Eye Movements of Spatial Working Memory Encoding in Children with and without Autism: Chunking Processing and Reference Preference.
Autistic kids chunk space less and cling to outside cues—give them visual frames or teach chunking tricks.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Li et al. (2021) watched kids' eyes while they memorized dot patterns on a screen. Half of the kids had autism, half were typical. The team asked two questions: Do autistic kids group dots into chunks? And do they lean on outside frames to remember where dots sit?
What they found
Eye tracking showed two clear splits. Autistic kids made fewer repeat looks at the same dot pairs, so they chunked less. They also glanced more at the screen edges, showing they needed outside anchors to hold the picture in mind.
How this fits with other research
Cardillo et al. (2022) saw the same split on a different task. When copying a complex figure, autistic kids used step-by-step working memory, while typical kids took in the whole shape at once. Both studies say the same thing: autistic children lean on local, piece-by-piece strategies.
Keehn et al. (2009) and Evers et al. (2014) add the reason. Shorter fixations and less grouping interference show a long-standing local bias. Songze et al. now link that bias to weaker chunking and stronger need for outside cues.
Kovarski et al. (2019) seem to clash at first: they found autistic kids move their eyes faster. Faster eyes could mean better search, but Songze shows the speed does not help build inner maps. The studies differ in task, not truth—speed helps find items, yet hurts forming a stable spatial picture.
Why it matters
When you give memory games, add clear borders, grids, or color blocks so outside frames do the holding for you. Or teach chunking outright: have kids rehearse pairs aloud or draw loops around groups. These small tweaks turn a frustrating task into a win.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) experience spatial working memory deficits and show different encoding mechanisms from typical developing (TD) peers. To effectively describe the encoding strategies of those with ASD and highlight their characteristics in cognitive processing, we adopted improved change detection tasks and added eye-movement indicators to investigate the chunking function and reference preference of children with and without ASD. The current study included 20 participants with ASD aged 8-16 and 20 TD children matched for age, gender, and intelligence. Experiment 1 used high/low-structured change detection tasks, and eye-movement indexes were recorded as they memorized the locations of the items to investigate spatial chunking strategies. In Experiment 2, changes in eye movement patterns were observed by adding a frame of reference. The results suggested different encoding strategies in ASD and TD individuals. The ASD group showed local processing bias and had difficulty adopting chunking strategies in spatial working memory. Eye-movement analysis suggested that they rarely showed integrated information processing tendency observed in TD children. Moreover, as a compensatory processing, they were more likely to use the frame of reference. In this study, we compared the spatial chunking strategies and reference preference of children with and without ASD, and eye-movement analysis was used to investigate the processing mechanism. These findings are significant for research on cognitive characteristics of ASD and provide a new focus for working memory training in children with ASD. LAY SUMMARY: The current study suggests that children with autism spectrum disorder are poorer at organizing items into chunks in spatial working memory, but rely more on reference frames. If the purpose of location memory is to strengthen the adaptability of children with autism, it should provide them with more clues or references. If it is for the purpose of intervention such as cognitive training, it should guide them to integrate information to improve the basic cognitive processing efficiency. Autism Res 2021, 14: 897-910. © 2020 International Society for Autism Research and Wiley Periodicals LLC.
Autism research : official journal of the International Society for Autism Research, 2021 · doi:10.1002/aur.2398