A different kind of Intelligence

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Autistics are presumed to be characterized by cognitive impairment, and their cognitive strengths (e.g., in Block Design performance) are frequently interpreted as low-level by-products of high-level deficits, not as direct manifestations of intelligence. Recent attempts to identify the neuroanatomical and neurofunctional signature of autism have been positioned on this universal, but untested, assumption. We therefore assessed a broad sample of 38 autistic children on the preeminent test of fluid intelligence, Raven’s Progressive Matrices. Their scores were, on average, 30 percentile points, and in some cases more than 70 percentile points, higher than their scores on the Wechsler scales of intelligence. Typically developing control children showed no such discrepancy, and a similar contrast was observed when a sample of autistic adults was compared with a sample of nonautistic adults.We conclude that intelligence has been underestimated in autistics.

These data challenge the assumption that autistic intelligence is only simple, low-level, perceptual expertise, which enables autistics to solve only tasks based on rote memory or the manipulation of geometric cubes, such as the Block Design task. Although autistics can be described as possessing enhanced perceptual functioning (Mottron, Dawson, Soulie` res, Hubert, & Burack, 2006), their performance on the Block Design subtest is correlated with their performance on the other Wechsler subtests (e.g., for the autistic children in the current study, r5.65, prep5.986). In addition, when autistics perform a series of Block Design tasks, altered so as to be optimally solved either through perception of local details or through configural processing, they display more versatility and better performance than nonautistics (Caron, Mottron, Berthiaume, & Dawson, 2006). Furthermore, in the current study, the relative difficulty of the 60 Raven’s Progressive Matrices items was highly correlated between the autistic and nonautistic children, r(58) 5 .96, suggesting that the test measured the same construct in the two groups. We have shown that autistics are not disproportionately impaired on a test of fluid intelligence, as many current theories of autism predict they should be. Instead of being limited to isolated Wechsler subtests assumed to measure only low-level rote memory and perception, autistic intelligence is manifested on the most complex single test of general intelligence in the literature. Although autistics no doubt deploy atypical cognitive processes in performing many tasks, we strongly caution against declaring these processes dysfunctional or assuming that autistics’ peaks and troughs on Wechsler scales ‘‘flout the premise of . . . general intelligence’’ (Scheuffgen, Happe´ , Anderson, &Frith, 2000, pp. 83–84).

In the present study, we investigated abstract reasoning ability, whose form of intelligence has been labeled fluid intelligence in the theory of Cattell [Cattell, R. B. (1963). Theory of fluid and crystallized intelligence: A critical experiment. Journal of Educational Psychology, 54, 1–22.], in children with Asperger’s disorder. A test of fluid intelligence, the Raven’s Standard Progressive Matrices Test, was administered to 17 children with Asperger’s disorder and 17 age-, gender-, and FIQ-matched normal children. The results showed that children with Asperger’s disorder outperformed on the test of fluid reasoning than typically developing children. We suggest that individuals with Asperger’s disorder have higher fluid reasoning ability than normal individuals, highlighting superior fluid intelligence.

...t the AD group (41.1 ± 9.3) made significantly more correct responses than the NC group (30.7 ± 10.3) [t(32) = 3.08, p < .01, Cohen’s ds = 1.05].
...Regarding the boys, the AD group (46.0 ± 2.6) outperformed the NC group (26.0 ± 2.6) [ds = 2.48]. On the other hand, the girls in the AD group (34.0 ± 3.0) showed the equivalent number of correct responses to the girls in the NC group (37.4 ± 3.0) [ds = 0.42]...
...The results of this study suggested that boys with Asperger’s disorder particularly performed better on the RSPM. It might be because that males are better at ‘systemizing’, that is, ‘to predict and to respond to the behavior of nonagentive deterministic systems by analyzing rules that govern such systems’ (Baron-Cohen, 2002)...

Recently, an interesting study of autistic intelligence has been published (Dawson et al., 2007). In this study, autistic children showed high scores on the RSPM. However, the percentile score on the RSPM were higher than the percentile scores on the Wechsler scales of intelligence in autistic children, while typically developing children did not show such discrepancy. The results of this study suggested that intelligence has been underestimated in autistics. Although this study was conducted to children with autism, and some autistics included IQ score below the average, indicating ‘low-functioning’ autism, our participants included children with Asperger’s disorder who had average or high IQ scores. Nevertheless, the results of our study were in line with those of the study by Dawson and colleagues (2007), since Asperger’s disorder shares the same clinical features to autism in poor social communication and is considered as one of autistic spectrum disorders (Wing, 1981). Recent cognitive neuroscience studies showed that analytic reasoning activates the left frontal cortex (Prabhakaran, Smith, Desmond, Glover, & Gabrieli, 1997; Wharton et al., 2000). Moreover, general fluid intelligence reflects the function of a specific neural system, including the lateral frontal cortex as one major part (Duncan et al., 2000; Gray et al., 2003). Thus, the left lateral frontal function may play an important role for fluid reasoning, and our results of superior fluid intelligence in Asperger’s disorder may imply the unique involvement in the left frontal lobe functioning.

Can you define fluid reasoning for me?

In psychology, fluid and crystallized intelligence (abbreviated Gf and Gc, respectively) are factors of general intelligence originally identified by Raymond Cattell.
Fluid intelligence is the ability to find meaning in confusion and solve new problems. It is the ability to draw inferences and understand the relationships of various concepts, independent of acquired knowledge.

My verbal IQ is 119 and my performance IQ is 109. I guess that means that I have more crystallized intelligence.

There is a study who show more little dispranency in their finding. http://www.springerlink.com/content/5803h01478m6t560/fulltext.pdf

Looking at that study the sample choce of autistic/NT seems biased to me.