WhyNot
January 29, 2012, 9:57am
81
Guinastasia:
Yes, but does his son have the mental capability of processing that? I wasn’t even autistic, and that would have given me nightmares!
Kid logic isn’t the same as adult logic.
Autistic people are not universally impaired in their IQs - especially if tested with tests designed to minimize language, like Raven’s Progressive Matrices, instead of the WISC. Even by conventional standards (ie WISC), a quarter of people with autism have normal or high IQ’s.
Your questions in this thread about his “mental age” would be appropriate if he *were *developmentally delayed (“retarded”), but we’ve no indication that is the case.
Really interesting article in how the use of new technologies by people with autism is leading scientists and doctors to reevaluate old ideas about autism and IQ: http://www.wired.com/medtech/health/magazine/16-03/ff_autism?currentPage=all
Last summer, the peer-reviewed journal Psychological Science published a study titled “The Level and Nature of Autistic Intelligence.” The lead author was Michelle Dawson. The paper argues that autistic smarts have been underestimated because the tools for assessing intelligence depend on techniques ill-suited to autistics. The researchers administered two different intelligence tests to 51 children and adults diagnosed with autism and to 43 non-autistic children and adults.
The first test, known as the Wechsler Intelligence Scale, has helped solidify the notion of peaks of ability amid otherwise pervasive mental retardation among autistics. The other test is Raven’s Progressive Matrices, which requires neither a race against the clock nor a proctor breathing down your neck. The Raven is considered as reliable as the Wechsler, but the Wechsler is far more commonly used. Perhaps that’s because it requires less effort for the average test taker. Raven measures abstract reasoning — “effortful” operations like spotting patterns or solving geometric puzzles. In contrast, much of the Wechsler assesses crystallized skills like acquired vocabulary, making correct change, or knowing that milk goes in the fridge and cereal in the cupboard — learned information that most people intuit or recall almost automatically.
What the researchers found was that while non-autistic subjects scored just about the same — a little above average — on both tests, the autistic group scored much better on the Raven. Two individuals’ scores swung from the mentally retarded range to the 94th percentile. More significantly, the subset of autistic children in the study scored roughly 30 percentile points higher on the Raven than they did on the more language-dependent Wechsler, pulling all but a couple of them out of the range for mental retardation.
A number of scientists shrugged off the results — of course autistics would do better on nonverbal tests. But Dawson and her coauthors saw something more. The “peaks of ability” on the Wechsler correlated strongly with the average scores on the Raven. The finding suggests the Wechsler scores give only a glimpse of the autistics’ intelligence, whereas the Raven — the gold standard of fluid intelligence testing — reveals the true, or at least truer, level of general intelligence.