Visual Memory of Meaningless Shapes in Children and Adolescents with Autism Spectrum Disorders

Objective: visual memory is an important cognitive ability, which hasbeen studied in individuals with autism spectrum disorders (asds). insuch studies meaningful shapes were used more frequently. sincemeaningless shapes provide a better assessment of short term visualmemory, in this study we used them to evaluate visual memory in childrenand adolescents with asds compared to the normal group .methods: four visual memory tests of cambridge neuropsychologicaltest automated battery (cantab) including paired associates learning(pal), pattern recognition memory (prm), spatial recognition memory(srm) and delayed matching to sample (dms) were administered to 15children and adolescents with asds (high functioning autism andasperger syndrome) and to 15 normal participants aged 8 to 17,with iq ofabove 70.results: individuals with asds performed worse than the normal groupon visual memory tasks. after eliminating iq as a covariate, no significantdifference was observed between the two groups in terms of visualmemory performance .conclusion: it seems that deficits on visual memory tasks in youths with asds could be related to their general intellectual abilities.