Digit Symbol Coding and Schizophrenia?

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This is a test that I've done surprisingly poorly on. With the records that I have, at 8 I scored at 5 (which was well below average) and at 15 I scored an 8 (which was better but still below average and lagged my overall IQ). On the test at 8, they didn't mention processing speed issues (though my Processing Speed Index was only 80), but they mentioned difficulties with visual-motor integration. Now, I had that 1 big-time psychotic episode at 14 that got me diagnosed with schizotypal personality disorder--my doctor later explained that he thought I was at the borderline of schizophrenia when he diagnosed me with it. Of course, looking back, we have no clue what in the heck that was.

Nevertheless, I have read about the relationship between schizophrenia, vulnerability to schizophrenia, and digit symbol coding, which piqued my interest. Apparently, people with schizophrenia or relatives with schizophrenia tend to do poorer on this test than healthy people. It seems that out of a whole bunch of neuropsychological tests, digit symbol coding stands out as having the biggest relationship to schizophrenia:

http://bjp.rcpsych.org/content/193/5/354.long

You can Google "digit symbol coding schizophrenia" and you'll get a lot of hits.

Of course, what is digit symbol coding? It's a subtest that is part of the Wechsler performance IQ and basically you have this key which has numbers on it with a corresponding symbol below each number. You then have a worksheet with numbers, and you must write the correct corresponding symbol under each number as fast as you can for 90 seconds. You are scored for how many symbols you were able to write within the time limit and for correctness.

Of course, what on God's green earth does this have to do with schizophrenia? Good question. I'm not 100% sure, but it has been repeatedly shown to distinguish people with schizophrenia and their relatives from healthy people pretty reliably, while predicting functional status--the lower your score, the worse your functioning tends to be if you have schizophrenia. It seems to be related to the ability to process information, and it is in fact part of the Processing Speed Index.

The test looks kinda like this:

[img][800:833]http://www.thinktonight.com/v/vspfiles/assets/images/wisc%20coding%208-16.jpg[/img]

http://www.thinktonight.com/WISC_IV_subtests_s/331.htm

I wonder how I'd perform today. Now, I've performed digit symbol coding-like tasks as an adult, like when I've manually converted 6502 assembly code into 6502 machine code using a printout* as a key and a hex editor (XVI32 specifically) to input the machine code directly into the ROM image, for the Famicom/NES. (This I did as part of ROM hacking, like when I created the Start Spaces patch for the SMB3 Map Editor. I have no idea if I was faster or slower than normal, but I remember being very very careful not to make errors. Despite all this, I actually enjoyed the process and would play music as I did and was proud of my work.

Maybe with all this extra practice I'd kick butt on the digit symbol coding subtest today? Perhaps my issue as a kid had more to do with the writing part than it did with the processing speed part? In that case, I should still have improved. Today, I can write all 100 kana (including the 4 obsolete ones) from memory and at least a few hundred Chinese characters from memory. I've had people say that when I write in Japanese, it looks like real Japanese and not just gaijin chickenscratch. Maybe I would perform much better on this subtest today, then?

I hope the psychiatrist I am seeing Monday will test my IQ on the Wechsler!

* It was specifically a printout of the TXT file from here:

http://nesdev.com/6502jsm.zip

This.. is strangely awesome! Although I don't recall this particular test the one time I did have my IQ tested, I remember my primary deficit being processing speed, something that's decidedly improved with me the more I study software, data science, machine learning and AI. Although it's on an absolutely different scale, I'm into ROM hacks myself. Apart from emulators I haven't done a whole lot with Nintendo, my interests focus on everything I'm able to run in my pocket. Full builds and extensions on Windows Mobile, Palm OS, various mobile Linux systems, Android and now Firefox have consumed most of my spare time where technology is concerned. I no longer bill my profession as app development because of this obtuse focus on full-stack or the 'code ball' if you will. I recently branched into virtualization as well, since it means managing all the same things in the context of a system that's already running.

_________________
"Standing on a well-chilled cinder, we see the fading of the suns, and try to recall the vanished brilliance of the origin of the worlds."
-Georges Lemaitre
"I fly through hyperspace, in my green computer interface"
-Gem Tos

There's a trick to passing the Digital Symbol Coding test: do one number at a time. In other words, first populate all 1's with the correct symbol (underscore with two serifs), then populate all 2's with the correct symbol (closing square bracket), then all 3's with the correct symbol (Venn diagram), etc. This is way faster than doing one number space at a time, each time looking up what symbol it corresponds to. You will be able to complete this in far under 90 seconds, provided you can write fast enough.

Of course, now that I let the cat out of the bag, the organization that wrote the test will be really p*ssed, much like it happened when the answers to the Rorschach test were leaked online. But that's a good thing, in both of these cases. Any tests designed to set up people to fail never should have been written in the first place.

This is where I score the lowest on an IQ test. In fact, last time I took an IQ test on this section I got less than 1% percentile. I have always scored low on this section and I don't know why. The other sections are all over the place but certainly not in the 1 percentile. I never knew it has anything to do with schizophrenia. Very interesting.

When I tried "taking" this again, I noticed something: When I'm in the middle of doing a task, I have a tendency to kinda temporarily slip into a daze where I look at nothing in particular and don't seem to be thinking about anything in particular before I realize what I'm doing and return to the task. That might slow me down. LOL.

I perform poorly on this test because of my 16th percentile processing speed. There are lots of things that can cause issues with processing speed and I think Autism is one of them.