Studying the relationship between emotion, memory, and perception in Autism

Losh and Capps' paper brought to my attention many ideas about the relationship between emotion, memory, and perception.

In one instance, they cite other studies that suggest "experiences rendered through narrative are more likely to be consolidated in memory". Typical children developed the narrative form of response when recounting emotional incidents, and L&C believe that this supports the "prospect that narrative activities may be integrally involved in emotional appraisal and that autistic individuals' noted difficulties with narrative, could, in part, inhibit their capacity for appraising emotional experiences and constructing emotion concepts and memoryies"

This presents an interesting relationship between formation of a narrative, and appraisal of emotions. It suggests that emotions are determined after the formation of a narrative, rather than the reverse. Yet we often address other individuals' emotions and seek reasons / create a narrative afterward.

L&C address this, and acknowledge that autistic individuals certainly posess less elaborate memories of emotions, (as Grandin suggested), and that formation of narrative is not cognitive bottleneck. They believe that memories of emotional events create a "knowledge base... on the causes, consequences and subjective meaning of affectively charged happenings, and that Lacking such a repository could render autistic individuals disadvantaged"

Still, the question remains as to why this knowledge base is not created. This leads me to believe that a core question in autism is studying the relationship between perception and emotion, or perception and creation of narratives. L&C point out the autistic group's tendency to point out the visual elements of emotions (angry faces, sad faces, etc). This leads us to believe that the understanding of emotion that this individuals have, is based more in visual-word association than some 'deeper' emotional understanding or empathy.

It seems that understanding social interaction, requires the need to process emotional information, which seems to be a consolidation or 'essentialized' form of information. As was emphasized in the Rage for Order film, the brain of an autistic individual is structured in such a way that it appears to prefer processing closed, predictable, and physical systems.

This reminds me of a hypothesis for Autism called, The Intense World Syndrome. As it proposes: "...the core pathology of the autistic brain is hyper-reactivity and hyper-plasticity of local neuronal circuits. Such excessive neuronal processing in circumscribed circuits is suggested to lead to hyper-perception, hyper-attention, and hyper-memory, which may lie at the heart of most autistic symptoms. In this view, the autistic spectrum are disorders of hyper-functionality, which turns debilitating, as opposed to disorders of hypo-functionality, as is often assumed."

This in does seem compatible with what the University of California researcher in the Rage for Order film was talking about --a deficit in that kind of coordinating ability that is apparent in the cerebellum. It may be that a dysfunction in this area is what allows hyper-sensitivity to perceptual information., or that hyper-activation of those circuits is what causes disfunction in the cerebellum, as researchers of that theory might propose.




As a side note, I just wanted to say/complain:

Reading Understanding of Emotional Experience in Autism: Insights From the Personal Accounts of High-Functioning Children With Autism, gave me a new found appreciation for the writing of Oliver Sacks and other narrative-neuro writers.

Take for example, this idea of understanding autism through a "discourse analytic framework", or, the great phrase, "personalized causal-explanatory narrative frameworks". I can't imagine anyone who doesn't have an hour to read the paper understanding this. Thankfully, we have writers who address the general public, letting us know that what the authors really mean to describe are, "recorded conversations" and "personal stories" respectively. Some fields are much worse, but this paper reminded me of the great need for popular science writers who can convey specific ideas in more accessible ways.