Reality Monitoring and Metamemory in Adults with Autism Spectrum Conditions

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Abstract

Studies of reality monitoring (RM) often implicate medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) in distinguishing internal and external information, a region linked to autism-related deficits in social and self-referential information processing, executive function, and memory. This study used two RM conditions (self-other; perceived-imagined) to investigate RM and metamemory in adults with autism. The autism group showed a deficit in RM, which did not differ across source conditions, and both groups exhibited a self-encoding benefit on recognition and source memory. Metamemory for perceived-imagined information, but not for self-other information, was significantly lower in the autism group. Therefore, reality monitoring and metamemory, sensitive to mPFC function, appear impaired in autism, highlighting a difficulty in remembering and monitoring internal and external details of past events.

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Most cited references 74

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Why the frontal cortex in autism might be talking only to itself: local over-connectivity but long-distance disconnection.

Eric Courchesne, Karen Pierce (2005)

Although it has long been thought that frontal lobe abnormality must play an important part in generating the severe impairment in higher-order social, emotional and cognitive functions in autism, only recently have studies identified developmentally early frontal lobe defects. At the microscopic level, neuroinflammatory reactions involving glial activation, migration defects and excess cerebral neurogenesis and/or defective apoptosis might generate frontal neural pathology early in development. It is hypothesized that these abnormal processes cause malformation and thus malfunction of frontal minicolumn microcircuitry. It is suggested that connectivity within frontal lobe is excessive, disorganized and inadequately selective, whereas connectivity between frontal cortex and other systems is poorly synchronized, weakly responsive and information impoverished. Increased local but reduced long-distance cortical-cortical reciprocal activity and coupling would impair the fundamental frontal function of integrating information from widespread and diverse systems and providing complex context-rich feedback, guidance and control to lower-level systems.

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Reality monitoring.

Marcia Johnson, Carol Raye (1981)

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Frontal lobes and human memory: insights from functional neuroimaging.

P C Fletcher, R. N. Henson (2001)

The new functional neuroimaging techniques, PET and functional MRI (fMRI), offer sufficient experimental flexibility and spatial resolution to explore the functional neuroanatomical bases of different memory stages and processes. They have had a particular impact on our understanding of the role of the frontal cortex in memory processing. We review the insights that have been gained, and attempt a synthesis of the findings from functional imaging studies of working memory, encoding in episodic memory and retrieval from episodic memory. Though these different aspects of memory have usually been studied in isolation, we suggest that there is sufficient convergence with respect to frontal activations to make such a synthesis worthwhile. We concentrate in particular on three regions of the lateral frontal cortex--ventrolateral, dorsolateral and anterior--that are consistently activated in these studies, and attribute these activations to the updating/maintenance of information, the selection/manipulation/monitoring of that information, and the selection of processes/subgoals, respectively. We also acknowledge a number of empirical inconsistencies associated with this synthesis, and suggest possible reasons for these. More generally, we predict that the resolution of questions concerning the functional neuroanatomical subdivisions of the frontal cortex will ultimately depend on a fuller cognitive psychological fractionation of memory control processes, an enterprise that will be guided and tested by experimentation. We expect that the neuroimaging techniques will provide an important part of this enterprise.

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Author and article information

Contributors

Jon S. Simons:

ORCID: http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7508-9084

+44 1223 333566 , jss30@cam.ac.uk

Journal

Journal ID (nlm-ta): J Autism Dev Disord

Journal ID (iso-abbrev): J Autism Dev Disord

Title: Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders

Publisher: Springer US (New York )

ISSN (Print): 0162-3257

ISSN (Electronic): 1573-3432

Publication date (Electronic): 22 February 2016

Publication date PMC-release: 22 February 2016

Publication date (Print): 2016

Volume: 46

Pages: 2186-2198

Affiliations

[ ]Department of Psychology, University of Cambridge, Downing Street, Cambridge, CB2 3EB UK

[ ]Autism Research Centre, Department of Psychiatry, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

Author information

Jon S. Simons http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7508-9084

Article

Publisher ID: 2749

DOI: 10.1007/s10803-016-2749-x

PMC ID: 4860197

PubMed ID: 26899724

SO-VID: 0609838b-5f15-4ec7-a4a5-7d573b275033

License:

Open AccessThis article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.

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Funding

Funded by: FundRef http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/100000913, James S. McDonnell Foundation;

Award ID: 220020333

Award Recipient : Jon S. Simons

Funded by: FundRef http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/501100000269, Economic and Social Research Council (GB);

Award ID: KFW/302552007

Award Recipient : Rose A. Cooper

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ScienceOpen disciplines: Neurology

Keywords: autism,episodic memory,reality monitoring,metacognition,metamemory

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ScienceOpen disciplines: Neurology

Keywords: autism, episodic memory, reality monitoring, metacognition, metamemory

Reality Monitoring and Metamemory in Adults with Autism Spectrum Conditions

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Abstract

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Karger: Cardiovascular System

Most cited references 74

Why the frontal cortex in autism might be talking only to itself: local over-connectivity but long-distance disconnection.

Reality monitoring.

Frontal lobes and human memory: insights from functional neuroimaging.

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