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aghogday
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03 Nov 2011, 1:50 pm

Research presented in another thread, that I thought deserved it's own thread. Autistic Individuals do much better on intelligence tests that are non-verbal. Questioning the current statistics on intelligence and Autism. Interesting that quite a few autistic individuals are part of the research team, as described in the full article.

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v479/n7371/full/479033a.html


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A changed mind
A few years ago, my colleagues and I decided to compare how well autistic and non-autistic adults and children performed in two different types of intelligence test: non-verbal ones, such as Raven's Matrices, that need no verbal instructions to complete, and tests that rely on verbal instructions and answers. We found that non-autistics as a group performed consistently in both types of test — if they scored in the 50th percentile in one, they tended to score around the 50th percentile in the other. However, autistics tended to score much higher in the non-verbal test than in the verbal one (see 'Autistic intelligence') — in some cases, as many as 90 percentile points higher8.


SOURCE: REF. 8
Despite autistics' success in Raven's Matrices, I, too, used to believe that verbal tests were the best measures of intelligence. It was Dawson who opened my eyes to this 'normocentric' attitude. She asked me: if autistics excel in a task that is used to measure intelligence in non-autistics, why is this not considered a sign of intelligence in autistics?

It is now amazing to me that scientists continue to use, as they have for decades, inappropriate tests to evaluate intellectual disability among autistics,which is routinely estimated to be about 75%. Only 10% of autistics have an accompanying neurological disease that affects intelligence, such as fragile-X syndrome, which renders them more likely to have an intellectual disability.

I no longer believe that intellectual disability is intrinsic to autism. To estimate the true rate, scientists should use only those tests that require no verbal explanation. In measuring the intelligence of a person with a hearing impairment, we wouldn't hesitate to eliminate components of the test that can't be explained using sign language; why shouldn't we do the same for autistics?

Of course, autism affects other functions, such as communication, social behaviour and motor abilities. These differences can render autistics more dependent on others, and make everyday life much more difficult. None of my arguments above is intended to minimize that.


Image

Has anyone here noticed if they score higher on the Raven matrices intelligence test than the Wechsler scales intelligence test, per expectation of the graph?



daveydino
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03 Nov 2011, 2:09 pm

I'm under the impression that testing only the Raven's matrices shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the concept of intelligence. Intelligence is a complete package. If you perform poorly on a verbal test and well on a non-verbal one, you still have to take into account the score for the verbal test.



Janissy
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03 Nov 2011, 2:19 pm

daveydino wrote:
I'm under the impression that testing only the Raven's matrices shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the concept of intelligence. Intelligence is a complete package. If you perform poorly on a verbal test and well on a non-verbal one, you still have to take into account the score for the verbal test.


Intelligence is a complete package but no intelligence test is able to comprehensively test all aspects and all ways of obtaining and categorizing information. What has historically happened is that a couple facets of intelligence are tested using only a couple ways of categorizing information and then the person is assigned a point on a linear continuum from mentally ret*d to gifted. This info adds another dimension. It challenges the assumption that if people aren't analyzing information verbally, they can't analyze information at all.



daveydino
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03 Nov 2011, 2:29 pm

So you agree with my standpoint of testing all facets of intelligence and taking the average from that? Wonderful.



DC
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03 Nov 2011, 2:37 pm

daveydino wrote:
I'm under the impression that testing only the Raven's matrices shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the concept of intelligence. Intelligence is a complete package. If you perform poorly on a verbal test and well on a non-verbal one, you still have to take into account the score for the verbal test.


In that case how is it possible to assess the intelligence of animals or deaf people or people that do not speak English, surely they should be classed as having zero intelligence?

In reality communication differences (like speaking a foreign language) have to be adjusted for and are completely separate from intelligence.



Ganondox
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03 Nov 2011, 2:39 pm

Is this just classic autism, or is it for the entire spectrum?



Janissy
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03 Nov 2011, 2:45 pm

daveydino wrote:
So you agree with my standpoint of testing all facets of intelligence...

yes


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.... and taking the average from that? Wonderful.


no


I believe the best information comes from using multiple tests. I do not believe in taking the average from that. I think that taking the average is where intelligence testing goes wrong. Taking the average to get a single score is necessary for putting people on a single linear scale. So I think doctors need to stop trying to put people on a linear scale. There is useful information in individual, non-averaged tests. The disparities between one person's different scores highlight areas of strength and weakness and can point the way to best learning styles. That useful information gets lost when different scores are averaged together to give a single score.

If I ran the zoo, I would not put single scores in anybody's medical or educational records. Instead I would put the various scores from different tests. If a person scores very well on a visual test but very poorly on a verbal test, it shows how information should be presented to them. If you average the scores together, you don't get any real, useable information. You just get a middling score that doesn't tell you anything about how that person gets and processes information.



daveydino
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03 Nov 2011, 2:47 pm

Too bad education is 100% verbal huh? Oh well, it's not like they'd be good learners.



Janissy
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03 Nov 2011, 2:56 pm

daveydino wrote:
Too bad education is 100% verbal huh? Oh well, it's not like they'd be good learners.


It isn't, blessedly. Although in the U.S. it is tending more and more towards that because it is the easiest to standardize. Luckily for me, I was educated in the mid 70's-early 80's when there was an educational fad towards incorporating multiple teaching methods. Things were taught verbally, visually and kinesthetically. Alas, NCLB is taking that away because visual and kinesthetic teaching are so hard to standardize.

My daughter goes to a very small school for disabled kids (not just autism). The teachers are well versed in how to use multiple test scores to figure out best teaching methods. A sdingle score would be useless to them. They need to know all the strengths and weaknesses of incoming kids so they can design a specialized curriculum.This is the luxury of a very high teacher:student ratio. I wish this was available to so many other kids but it is impossible to standardize.

But even now, even with standardization, education is not 100% verbal.



aghogday
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03 Nov 2011, 3:14 pm

Ganondox wrote:
Is this just classic autism, or is it for the entire spectrum?


According to the full orginal research article per reference 8, in the article presented in this post, all individuals were diagnosed with autism disorder. None were diagnosed with either PDD NOS or Aspergers.

There is a another study that was done in the same time frame with a different research group that found individuals with Aspergers also scored much higher on the Raven matrices test of intelligence.



Last edited by aghogday on 03 Nov 2011, 3:27 pm, edited 1 time in total.

buryuntime
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03 Nov 2011, 3:17 pm

My IQ results are similar. My nonverbal test was substantially higher in score compared to Wechsler's.