Fig. 2

A summary of brain functional asymmetries during memory processing in ASD. Brain functional asymmetries during memory processing in ASD are dependent to the material (top right part of the panel): a relative preservation of left over right-hemisphere activity and connectivity for verbal and visuospatial material and a greater impairment of dorsal streams than of ventral ones, for visuospatial material. Apart from these material-dependent effects, functional asymmetries were generally found during working (WM) maintenance and episodic recognition (top left part of the panel): a relative preservation of posterior activity—including a full hippocampal one—and connectivity over frontal activity and antero-posterior long-range connectivity. Interactions between the location of these functional alterations with specialization of brain areas may result in atypical WM (diminished rehearsal process and top-down control, lowered task-set relevance) and episodic memory (reduced context-guided encoding, pre- and post-retrieval processes; high episodic processing of relational information, with lowered general context processing), and underpin the cognitive pattern of memory preservation and difficulties identified in meta-analyses in ASD (lower part of the panel), including impaired—especially visuospatial—WM and episodic memory for complex stimuli, including face recognition