gtto the link is not working for me.
Karrie
Gtto's link is not working for me either.Oh Gtto! I had not heard this.
Very unfortunate as I use it for a heads up on a lot of research.
Thank you for the information.
Bruce Bower
There's more to the intelligence of autistic people than meets the IQ. Unlike most individuals, children and adults diagnosed as autistic often score much higher on a challenging, nonverbal test of abstract reasoning than they do on a standard IQ test, say psychologist Laurent Mottron of Hôpital Rivière-des-Prairies in Montreal and his colleagues.
The same autistic individuals who score near or below the IQ cutoff for "low functioning" or "mental retardation" achieve average or even superior scores on a test that taps a person's ability to infer rules and to think abstractly about geometric patterns, Mottron's team reports in the August Psychological Science.
"Intelligence has been underestimated in autistics," Mottron says. Autistic people solve problems and deploy neural resources in unusual ways, which are poorly understood and might contribute to problems with IQ tests, he asserts.
Mottron regards autism as a variant of healthy neural development. For that reason, his group—including study coauthor Michelle Dawson, herself diagnosed as autistic—prefers the term "autistic" to "person with autism."
The researchers studied 38 autistic children, ages 7 to 16; 13 autistic adults, ages 16 to 43; 24 nonautistic children, ages 6 to 16; and 19 nonautistic adults, ages 19 to 32.
Volunteers completed an age-appropriate IQ test and a Raven's Progressive Matrices test. The latter test includes 60 items, each consisting of a series of related geometric designs and a choice of six or eight alternative designs, one of which completes the series.
The nonautistic children and adults scored slightly above the population average on both tests.
In contrast, autistic kids and adults scored far higher on the Raven's test than they did on the IQ tests. These youngsters' average IQ was substantially below the population average, but their average score on the Raven's test was in the normal range.
One-third of autistic children qualified as "low functioning" by IQ, but only 5 percent did so by Raven's scores. Moreover, another third of the autistic children achieved "high intelligence" on the Raven's test.
As in previous research, autistic volunteers performed well on an IQ task that required them to reproduce geometric designs using colored blocks.
The new findings confirm prior indications that autistics score poorly on IQ tests despite processing perceptual information well, comments psychologist Uta Frith of University College London. In a 2000 study, Frith's team noted that autistic and nonautistic children made equally rapid and accurate visual judgments, such as discerning which of two lines was longer.
In people with autism, a lack of social insight derails the ability to acquire skills and information from others, a key to IQ success, Frith theorizes. Autistics thus succeed only on self-explanatory tasks, such as the Raven's test.
The Raven's test may measure autistic intelligence better than an IQ test does, adds psychologist Helen Tager-Flusberg of Boston University. Nonetheless, many autistic children are extremely impaired intellectually, she says.
Researchers generally sell short the unique features of autistic intelligence, Dawson responds. For example, autistics shift flexibly back and forth between focusing on details of a scene or its overall configuration, whereas nonautistics single-mindedly concentrate on the big picture, she says.
For those of you who do not subscribe, this comes from the "Schafer Report." It is a great email and really we should all be subscribing as it has incredible information regarding things that pertain to our kids.
http://lists.igc.org/mailman/listinfo/sarnet
Although... often also has some eally nasty and even defamatory comments towards autistic self-advocates. In fact, the Schafer report once posted that one of the researchers who worked on the study just described, could not possibly be autistic, accused autistic people who could do public speaking of not being autistic, and accused this researcher of having borderline personality disorder and of being a journalist rather than a real autism researcher. This is the link:Tom has just had his school placement meeting yesterday (he's going to the school attached to his nursery, yay!
Now me, I am the complete opposite when it comes to verbal versus performance skills. I score highly on the written verbal and really low on the non verbal. About the only thing I can do quickly is spotting the hidden figures in embedded picture tests.
but.... can we really change the historic measure of intelligence, which includes both verbal and non-verbal components, to suit our kids? Does that really help with anything? If intelligence tests are solely for predicting academic acheivement in a typical educational environment, does it really make sense to change how intelligence is measured in order that our kids will perform on par with the NT peers? A kid may do very well on the Raven's matrices, but he/she doesn't have a good communication system, he might be a genious according to that measure, but would not be able to function at all in a regular classroom.
So, I guess I'm asking, what's the point of this? How can we make use of this data?
re: the Shaefer report - from what I've read of it, it really pushes the vaccine/mercury hypothesis, so, if you read the report without counterbalancing it with other sources, you will be presented with a rather one sided view of the disability and one that is relentlessly pathological and intolerant of contrary opinions. But I only read it once or twice, so maybe I read the wrong installments.
So, I guess I'm asking, what's the point of this? How can we make use of this data?
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To me, the point is that most parents needlessly freak when their ASD kid is given an IQ test and he scores so very low. If we parents understand that our kids do know a lot but have difficulty communicating it, then we will not stand for the "low intelligence" BS many of us are handed. To me, the point is that when a child is put in a "low intelligence" category, he is not supported or encouraged in his abilities. Nothing is inherently "wrong" about an MR diagnosis, but in the case of ASD kids, it is more than likely, false, and it implies a cap of aptitude.
I see reports like this not as coddling ASD kids, or as making excuses, but as education for parents and for people who work with our kids. To help us all better understand how autism works. We, as a culture, have changed our thinking about a whole host of "disorders" including cerebral palsy, femaleness, left handedness, non-white skin tone, etc. etc. "Society" does indeed change its attitude over time and because of reports like this one.
The same test has been used for a long time to be fair to people from different cultures and languages. It's no different here.Thanks for sharing the article.
I'm not sure how my son would perform on the Raven, but I'm all for research that chips away at the "autistics are almost always retarded myth". My son got a mild retardation diagnosis that we disagree with, because he was basically untestable at the time, too unfocused and unwilling to really show what he is capable of.
Since this topic touched on the subject of autistic strengths, I'll re-post my previous links on this subject:
http://www.yourlittleprofessor.com/benefits.html
http://home.earthlink.net/~mellowtigger/conf/SquarePegs-2003 1002.html
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Autistic Strengths reviewed for the workplace:
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