Sat, 04 Aug 2007

The matrix of autism

I've observed this kind of reasoning ability in my autistic grandson. It seems to me that autism and mental retardation are two completely different things: there may an autistic child who is retarded, but the percentages probably aren't any greater than for the population as a whole. Autism seems to have more to do with perceptual and communicative skills than reasoning abilities.

Autistic children are doubly stigmatized. On the one hand, they are often dismissed as "low functioning" or mentally retarded, especially if they have poor speaking skills as many do. But when they display exceptional visual discrimination or memory for detail, they are dubbed "savants." New research in Psychological Science is discovering the level and nature of autistic intelligence.

(link) [EurekAlert! - Breaking News]

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