Allocentric Versus Egocentric Spatial Memory in Adults with Autism Spectrum Disorder

Abstract

Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) present difficulties in forming relations among items and context. This capacity for relational binding is also involved in spatial navigation and research on this topic in ASD is scarce and inconclusive. Using a computerised version of the Morris Water Maze task, ASD participants showed particular difficulties in performing viewpoint independent (allocentric) navigation, leaving viewpoint dependent navigation (egocentric) intact. Further analyses showed that navigation deficits were not related to poor visual short-term memory or mental rotation in the ASD group. The results further confirm the need of autistic individuals for support at retrieval and have important implications for the design of signposts and maps.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (10.1007/s10803-018-3465-5) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Shared reality and abstraction: The social nature of predictive models

“…The syndrome of autism, along with its dimensional extension to individual differences in autistic (or what Witkin called field-independent) traits, exemplifies this association between construal and psychological distance: Spatial, temporal, social, and hypothetical distances resurface as autistic differences in mapping between allocentric and egocentric space (Conson et al 2015;Frith & de Vignemont 2005;Hamilton et al 2009;Pearson et al 2014;Ring et al 2018), impulsivity and executive disinhibition (Hill 2004), social perspective-taking and other aspects of cognitive empathy (Baron-Cohen 1995), and repetitivebehavioural aversion to unpredictability and change (Gomot & Wicker 2012). Gilead et al relate the distinction between raw perceptual observations and elaborated cognitive models (abstracta) to the contrast between detail-orientated, first-person simulation and abstract, allocentric theory in predicting the behaviour of the world; impairment in prediction when constraints are underspecified, dynamic, or real-timeas is the case in social cognitionhas been identified time (Courchesne & Allen 1997) and again (Sinha et al 2014;Van de Cruys et al 2014) as a unifying feature of autism which may drive the co-occurrence of anxiety and rituals, perceptual dysmodulation, visuomotor deficits, slowed orienting of attention, and undifferentiated processing of stimuli regardless of task-relevance.…”

Enhanced Spatial Navigation Skills in Sequence-Space Synesthetes

“…It may seem surprising that sequence-space synesthetes did not perform significantly better than controls in the other allocentric and egocentric tasks (i.e., Allocentric 2 and Egocentric 2, the two conditions added by Ring et al, 2018). However, in this allocentric task, the platform moved along with the objects while the participant kept the same position and in this egocentric task, the platform moved along with the participant while the objects remained fixed.…”

Spatial navigation from same and different directions: The role of executive functions, memory and attention in adults with autism spectrum disorder

“…There are two factors that may be able to explain the discrepancies in results for the current and past navigation studies. First, previous studies that used a virtual pool environment, where participants were asked to find a hidden platform in a computer‐based version of the Morris Water Maze [Edgin & Pennington, ; Ring et al, ] presented the navigation environment in an aerial view, which may have made the formation of an abstract navigation map easier. These tests are, therefore, less realistic in terms of the real life navigation requirements than 3‐D environments.…”

“…There are two factors that may be able to explain the discrepancies in results for the current and past navigation studies. First, previous studies that used a virtual pool environment, where participants were asked to find a hidden platform in a computer-based version of the Morris Water Maze [Edgin & Pennington, 2005;Ring et al, 2018] presented the navigation environment in 1 Inspecting the data presented below only for the 36 ASD individuals and 25 TD individuals that took part in the IED from the CANTAB, the directions of the effects stayed the same. However, the main effect of group in the accuracy analysis (p 5 .14) as well as the difference in memory for animal positions (p 5 .108) missed significance, which could be caused by the reduced sample size.…”

“…Some studies found no differences between groups [Edgin & Pennington, 2005;Caron, Mottron, Rainville, & Chouinard, 2004], some studies found an overall navigational deficit in ASD independent of whether conditions probed allocentric or egocentric skills [Lind, Williams, Raber, Peel, & Bowler, 2013], and a few studies found specific allocentric navigational difficulties as predicted [Prior & Hoffmann, 1990;Lind, Bowler, & Raber, 2014;Ring et al, 2018]. Only three of these earlier studies compared allocentric and egocentric conditions within one study [Lind et al, 2013Ring et al, 2018]. Since executive functions have been found to play an important role in spatial navigation [Moffat, Kennedy, Rodrigue, & Raz, 2007], they may be a relevant factor in explaining some of the inconsistencies found in previous spatial navigation studies in ASD.…”