A physiological marker of recognition memory in adults with autism spectrum disorder? The Pupil Old/New Effect

This study investigated the pupil Old/New effect in individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and typical development (TD). Participants studied verbal and visual meaningful and meaningless materials in black and white on a computer screen. Pupil sizes were measured while participants performed a Remember (episodic memory with context) /Know (semantic memory, no context) recognition memory test. ASD compared to TD individuals showed significantly reduced recognition rates for all materials. Both groups showed better memory for visual compared to verbal (picture superiority effect) and meaningful compared to meaningless materials. A pupil size ratio (pupil size for test item divided by baseline) for old (studied) and new (unstudied) materials indicated larger pupils for old compared to new materials only for the TD but not the ASD group. Pupil size in response to old versus new items was positively related to recognition accuracy, confirming that the pupil Old/New effect reflects a memory phenomenon in the ASD group. In addition, this study suggests an involvement of the noradrenergic neurotransmitter system in the abnormal hippocampal functioning in ASD. Implications of these findings as well as their underlying neurophysiology will be discussed in relation to current theories of memory in ASD

Accelerating Atomic Orbital-based Electronic Structure Calculation via Pole Expansion and Selected Inversion

We describe how to apply the recently developed pole expansion and selected inversion (PEXSI) technique to Kohn-Sham density function theory (DFT) electronic structure calculations that are based on atomic orbital discretization. We give analytic expressions for evaluating the charge density, the total energy, the Helmholtz free energy and the atomic forces (including both the Hellman-Feynman force and the Pulay force) without using the eigenvalues and eigenvectors of the Kohn-Sham Hamiltonian. We also show how to update the chemical potential without using Kohn-Sham eigenvalues. The advantage of using PEXSI is that it has a much lower computational complexity than that associated with the matrix diagonalization procedure. We demonstrate the performance gain by comparing the timing of PEXSI with that of diagonalization on insulating and metallic nanotubes. For these quasi-1D systems, the complexity of PEXSI is linear with respect to the number of atoms. This linear scaling can be observed in our computational experiments when the number of atoms in a nanotube is larger than a few hundreds. Both the wall clock time and the memory requirement of PEXSI is modest. This makes it even possible to perform Kohn-Sham DFT calculations for 10,000-atom nanotubes with a sequential implementation of the selected inversion algorithm. We also perform an accurate geometry optimization calculation on a truncated (8,0) boron-nitride nanotube system containing 1024 atoms. Numerical results indicate that the use of PEXSI does not lead to loss of accuracy required in a practical DFT calculation

Understanding pretence and understanding action

Two studies were carried out in an attempt to replicate an earlier but controversial set of findings that suggested that young children are able to understand pretence in a mentalistic sense (Hickling, Wellman, & Gottfried, 1997). In Study 1, 65 three-year-olds and 77 four-year-olds were asked to either judge the thoughts of an absent teddy bear, who had not witnessed a change in the original pretence stipulation, or were asked to complete a similar, standard false-belief task. Study 2 repeated the experimental procedures of the first study with 24 three-year-olds and 16 four-year-olds, with the difference that all children had to complete both tasks in a single session. The results obtained across both studies showed that 3-year-olds were unable to correctly judge the discrepant thoughts of the teddy bear, suggesting that young children do not attribute a false belief to another actor during pretend play, and that instead they view pretence in terms of overt action

Recognition memory, self-other source memory, and theory-of-mind in children with autism spectrum disorder

This study investigated semantic and episodic memory in autism spectrum disorder (ASD), using a task which assessed recognition and self-other source memory. Children with ASD showed undiminished recognition memory but significantly diminished source memory, relative to age- and verbal ability-matched comparison children. Both children with and without ASD showed an “enactment effect”, demonstrating significantly better recognition and source memory for self-performed actions than other-person-performed actions. Within the comparison group, theory-of-mind (ToM) task performance was significantly correlated with source memory, specifically for other-person-performed actions (after statistically controlling for verbal ability). Within the ASD group, ToM task performance was not significantly correlated with source memory (after controlling for verbal ability). Possible explanations for these relations between source memory and ToM are considered