Neuropsychologia 40 (2002) 108 – 118 Fractionation of visual memory: agency detection and its impairment in autism R.J.R. Blair a,b, *, U. Frith a,b , N. Smith c , F. Abell a,b , L. Cipolotti c a Institute of Cognitie Neuroscience, Uniersity College London, Alexandra House, 17 Queen Square, London WC1H 3AR, UK b Department of Psychology, Uniersity College London, Gower Street, London WC1H 6BT, UK c Department of Clinical Neuropsychology, National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery Queen Square, London WC1N 3BG, UK Received 20 July 2000; received in revised form 22 January 2001; accepted 12 February 2001 Abstract It is known that the adult visual memory system is fractionable into functionally independent cognitive subsystems, selectively susceptible to brain damage. In addition, there have been hints from studies with individuals with autism that these cognitive subsystems can fractionate developmentally. However, there has been a paucity of systematic investigations. The present study involves the analysis of visual memory of a population of individuals with autism and age- and VIQ-matched comparison individuals. The individuals with autism presented selective impairments in face recognition in comparison to both the age- and VIQ-matched comparison populations. In addition, they were impaired relative to the age-matched comparison group on recognition memory for potential agents (i.e. objects capable of self-propelled motion) whether they were living (cats and horses) or non-living (motorbikes). In contrast, they were selectively superior relative to the VIQ-matched comparison group on recognition memory for such objects as topographical stimuli (buildings) and leaves that clearly do not have agency. The data is interpreted in terms of reduced sensitivity to agency cues in individuals with autism and general information processing capacity. © 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Fractionation; Visual memory; Agency detection; Autism www.elsevier.com/locate/neuropsychologia 1. Introduction Studies of patients with acquired neurological lesions have informed us about the degree to which neuro-cog- nitive systems fractionate in the adult brain. For exam- ple, with reference to visual memory, two types of visual memoranda have been shown to be dissociable. Thus, patients have been reported to show selective difficulties in recognising unfamiliar buildings and land- marks [10,42,49,64]. However, despite these impair- ments, some of these patients have been found to have preserved recognition memory for other visual stimuli, such as unknown faces [34]. Conversely, Maguire and Cipolotti [38] described a patient whose topographical recognition memory for unknown buildings, landscapes and outdoor scenes was preserved whilst her recogni- tion memory for unfamiliar faces was impaired. They propose that this double dissociation indicates that the adult visual memory system is fractionable into func- tionally independent cognitive subsystems that are se- lectively susceptible to brain damage. An interesting, related question is the degree to which neuro-cognitive systems fractionate developmen- tally; i.e. are there individuals who show appropriate development for some systems in the context of pro- foundly dysfunctional development in others. Such, and related, questions are beginning to receive considerable attention in the developmental literature [29,37]. Thus, as regards visual memory development, are there indi- viduals who show appropriate development of some visual memory systems in the context of profoundly dysfunctional development in other visual memory sys- tems? Previous work with individuals with autism sug- gests that this may be the case [12,19,25]. Three studies have investigated visual recognition memory in individuals with autism using a variety of * Corresponding author. Tel.: +44-20-76961162; fax: +44-20- 78132835. E-mail address: j.blair@ucl.ac.uk (R.J.R. Blair). 0028-3932/01/$ - see front matter © 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. PII: S0028-3932(01)00069-0