page_title: Memory and social interactions
section_title: Autism spectrum disorders
hierarchical_section_title: Memory and social interactions / Memory for faces / Difficulties with facial recognition / Autism spectrum disorders
caption_attribution_description: Reversible Head with Basket of Fruit
context_page_description: Memory supports and enables social interactions in a variety of ways. In order to engage in successful social interaction, people must be able to remember how they should interact with one another, whom they have interacted with previously, and what occurred during those interactions. There are a lot of brain processes and functions that go into the application and use of memory in social interactions, as well as psychological reasoning for its importance.
context_section_description: Autism spectrum disorders (ASD) are neurological development disorders characterized by repetitive behaviors and impaired social skills.  Patients with ASD are also characterized by over-selectivity, which is a tendency to attend to only a few stimuli.  Over-selectivity causes memory encoding problems, as relevant information is not attended to, and thus not stored in memory.  These encoding problems are associated with an impaired memory for faces, which is in turn associated with impairments in social functioning.
caption: In pictures such as this prosopagnosics can identify each individual fruit but cannot identify the face.
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