Load matters: neural correlates of verbal working memory in children with autism spectrum disorder

Vogan, Vanessa M.; Francis, Kaitlyn E.; Morgan, Benjamin R.; Smith, Mary Lou; Taylor, Margot J. · 2018 · DOAJ

DOI: 10.1186/s11689-018-9236-y

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Summary

This study investigates the neural correlates of verbal working memory (WM) in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) compared to typically developing (TD) peers, specifically examining how cognitive load affects brain activation. While executive functioning deficits are known to impact core ASD symptoms, few studies have utilized neuroimaging to identify the specific neural systems underlying verbal WM capacity in youth with ASD. The authors aimed to isolate the effects of cognitive load on verbal WM by using a task that holds executive demands constant while systematically increasing memory load. The researchers recruited 57 youth aged 9–16 years, comprising 27 participants with ASD and 30 sex- and age-matched TD controls. Participants completed a one-back letter matching task (LMT) during functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The LMT required participants to identify if relevant letters in a current stimulus matched those in the previous stimulus, ignoring irrelevant distractors. Cognitive load was manipulated across four difficulty levels by increasing the number of relevant letters to be remembered. Linear trend analyses were conducted to examine brain regions recruited as a function of increasing cognitive load, controlling for motion and other confounding variables. Behavioral results indicated that while reaction times were similar between groups, TD youth demonstrated higher accuracy than ASD youth at the two highest load conditions. Neural patterns differed significantly between the groups. TD youth exhibited the expected opposing cognitive processing system: activation increased in classic WM regions, including lateral and medial frontal and superior parietal areas, while deactivation occurred in default mode network (DMN) regions as load increased. In contrast, youth with ASD showed little recruitment of frontal and parietal regions across increasing loads, failing to demonstrate the positive linear trend seen in TD participants. However, the ASD group did show similar modulation of DMN deactivation. Specifically, TD children had significantly stronger positive linear relations between activation and cognitive load in the bilateral prefrontal cortex, precuneus, and inferior parietal lobule compared to the ASD group. The findings suggest that youth with ASD are unable to effectively manage increasing verbal information due to a failure to recruit frontal and parietal networks in response to cognitive demand, despite modulating the DMN. This impaired neural recruitment likely contributes to the observed behavioral deficits in complex verbal WM tasks. The authors conclude that these atypical neural processing patterns may interfere with academic and social success in youth with ASD. Identifying these specific neural mechanisms is critical for developing and monitoring targeted interventions for working memory deficits in this population.

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• working memory