Autism and Abstract Reasoning

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I looked at the quoted text for quite a while before I figured out what I had done. I spent most of the time figuring out how my comment disappeared. It took me several minutes to figure it out.. I started to seriously wonder if it was a sign of looming dementia. But I have often felt somewhere in that area off and on through the course of my life. I guess it's the ADHD. At least I hope it is this time.

I think abstract reasoning varies with IQ. The higher your IQ, the more likely abstract reasoning is to be a relative strength, versus a weakness ('g' or general intelligence seems to relate to abstract thinking ability). This is true whether or not you're autistic, and since autistics tend to have a wider range of IQ, would tend to result in more autistics having a noticeable strength or weakness in this.

In addition, how good you are at abstract thinking can depend on what kind of task it is. Some are good at verbal abstraction, some at nonverbal, etc. NTs tend to be better at abstract social reasoning (ToM is an abstract reasoning skill). However, when it comes to less socially-dependent abstraction (eg abstract mathematics), I think autism itself doesn't make much of a difference.

There are a subset of LFAs who seem to have a very severe difficulty in abstraction, and this appears to be their biggest impediment to communication. These people, the more abstract and symbolic a communication method is, the more they struggle. They are typically nonverbal, do a bit better with sign than speech (especially iconic signs, which look like what they represent), and do best with picture communication, often showing better performance with photographs than drawings. But some non-autistics with severe MR show the same pattern of ability, so it could be just IQ-related.

My abstraction ability seems to fail with one group of objects: food.

I often can't process the meaning of food. I'll sit at the dinner table and see food as it is, but my brain won't process what I see into meaning. I won't recognize the food as food, so I won't eat it until my mother tells me that this food and I should eat it. My father has the same trait.

I call this "it is what it is" cognition. What I see is what I see, and there is no meaning beyond the sensory perception. I don't know why this kind of cognition applies specifically to food in my case.

In another case, I sometimes hear speech as sounds without meaning. This happens in quiet rooms when I have listened to five or ten minutes of someone speaking. I still hear the same sounds, but they stop making sense. In that case, I am aware that I am hearing speech that no longer makes sense, and that is odd to me. But when it comes to food that I see, I am not aware that there is a processing into meaning problem. It seems completely normal that there are piles of things on the dinner table that are just shapes with no meaning to me. I only realize that something is off when someone mentions that I am not eating.

Also, I think that my verbal abstraction abilities developed much slower than non-verbal. I always had the non-verbal abstraction ability, but it took longer for the verbal to show up. I think that you can tell by how a child plays. If the child plays pretend, then they probably have verbal abstraction in addition to non-verbal. If the child plays with objects in a complex way like arranging into patterns and building but never pretend, then they probably have non-verbal abstraction. If the child doesn't play with anything in a complex way, then there might be a problem with non-verbal abstraction.

I think this is true when verbal abilities are present. However, Dawson's research that I linked in the topic post, assessed the children with Autistic Disorder as improved from 25 percentile measurement of full scale Standard IQ measures to 55% percentile with Raven Matrices test of fluid intelligence. They scored in the intellectual disability range before the Raven Matrices test, and after the Raven Matrices test while they still had the verbal IQ deficits, their non-verbal abstract reasoning abilities were measured at well above normal. Since abstraction is considered a prerequisite to general intelligence, one would think they might eventually develop a means of communication that was not verbal, in nature. Some of them likely already had developed that ability as those abilities were not identified in the research.

Interestingly the adult people with Asperger's syndrome, actually were measured at slightly lower measures of full scale standard intelligence as opposed to those with Autistic Disorder scoring over the 50 percentile mark, and then with the autistic disorder individuals actually scoring slightly higher than the control group with Raven Matrices testing. All groups including non-autistics scored overall higher on the raven matrices tests, as compared to standard measures of full scale intelligence. Which is in alignment with the theory that fluid intelligence can be increased over the course of childhood into young adulthood depending on the cultural learning environment.

It seems apparent that Dawson likely recruited all of the adults in study, including those with Autistic Disorder from the University environment, so the adult research was limited in that manner although not identified as a limitation in the study.

There are several studies only using individuals with Asperger's and control groups that are college graduates as subjects, with IQ's in the average 121 range. One of which, the Roger's study, is often used to back up the idea that people on the entire spectrum experience greater personal distress in the emotional contagion of empathy when witnessing the stress of others than control groups. Obviously that type of study is limited as only those able to answer complex self surveys participate.

http://www.cog.psy.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/p ... Disord.pdf

btbnnyr, have you encountered the word "agnosia" before?

I think that the way I see certain categories of things could be related to agnosia, but in a verry merry berry mild form compared to true agnosia. It's like my brain made the perception from the bottom-up, but didn't go farther to make the meaning, but the agnosia-like phenomenon only happens some of the time and never when I am directing attention to the objects from the top-down. So whatever I have can't be detected in the lab by showing me pictures and having me recognize and identify objects. But it is a part of my real world eggsperience, and I do think that it has to do with how the autistic brain is biased towards sensory perception and data-driven cognition and away from theory-driven cognition in which you are biased towards seeing what you eggspect to see and missing other details, the so-called irrelevant stimuli that gets filtered out by the nt brain. My mother calls that deleting.

Yeah, I think that agnosia-like experiences are common for at least some people with autism. I experience periods where my senses stop "processing" but I continue to see, hear, etc. It's definitely milder and less consistent than true agnosia (which is I think mostly due to traumatic brain injury) and is sometimes limited to certain objects in the environment and nothing else. I think that is also consistent with a lot of autistic symptoms or impairments, in that they resemble varieties of TBI, but not as severe.

Donna Williams writes about "meaning blindness" and "meaning deafness" as well.

I just discovered this thread, and there are so many interesting things being said here, and I would love to respond to a lot of it - but I got exhausted about halfway through. I really hate being such a slow reader

I'll just respond to this for now:

I recently did the test that has a charge, (which I chose not to pay), and it is this one:
http://www.raventest.net/

The one linked to in the above quote I did a few weeks ago, and it didn't charge anything. I scored 130, by the way, and I didn't try very hard, just kind of hurried through it. (Being a Dane, I chose the Danish version). It's shorter than the Raven's test with 39 questions instead of 60, but I'm not sure it's any easier.

Thanks for that clarification. I was disappointed when I took the test and it asked me to pay at the end, not so much at paying for it, but because there was no suggestion there was going to be any payment due for it at the end. It might have been the one at Raventest.net, that I used instead of the one you clarified as free.

I tried this test too and I was dissapointed as it asked to pay (but after I saw that unsortable wrote it had a charge and then I knew what it meant as I read it in the original post as well, but I missed the meaning of the words).
In the WAIS I had one mistake in the Raven's and the person who took it from me is my leading psychologist.
I thought about asking her the IQ on the WAIS it would give having one mistake.
I have no idea about it.

Last edited by Eloa on 09 Feb 2013, 8:47 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I relate to you.
I cannot give meaning to food as well, I see color and shape.
It could be anything.
Sometimes smell can make me eat.
What you say about the speach:
When there is a crowd of people (1+) it happens a lot to me that I cannot connect the voice to the speaker anymore, as it is very hard for me to follow.
So the speech is disconnecting and I see a human being moving its lips but I cannot connect the words anymore to it.
Both are independant from each other and not connectable anymore.

Raven's IQ 108.

Two comments:

Firstly, MR is often misdiagnosed in nonverbal/minimally verbal individuals. It's extremely difficult to accurately assess someone who can't speak - especially if they have receptive language issues as well. How can you tell someone who doesn't know how to do x from someone who doesn't know you want them to do x?

Secondly, Raven's isn't just an abstract reasoning test - it's an abstract visual reasoning test. If your visual skills are better than your verbal skills, your Raven's score will be higher even if your abstract reasoning isn't a particular strength. (Although it does need to not be a major weakness.)

I think that raven's can be done using visual or verbal strategies. I use visual, so I look at the pictures, abstract the pattern in a non-verbal way, then fill in the pattern. But someone else can use verbal, so they can look, abstract the pattern as a verbal rule, then apply the rule and process of elimination to fill in the pattern. I think that the visual way would be faster than the verbal way, and autistic people have been shown to answer the questions faster with equal levels of performance in a Dawson/Mottron paper. They engaged more of the occipital regions, while nts engaged more of the frontal regions.

I remember that there was a bunch of music tests posted on wp a long time ago, and one of them was a abstracting music into a visual pattern. I used a non-verbal strategy for that too, but someone else who did the test told me that they used a verbal strategy, coming up with a set of verbally stated rules to apply to get the answers. Again, I think that non-verbal would be faster than verbal, but much harder to communicate.

In terms of visual abilities required for raven's, it seems to me that there is not much visual-perceptual ability required. A test that requires a lot of visual-perceptual ability would be something like mental rotation. For me, visual-perceptual is a peak of ability, and verbal abstract reasoning works well, but is not a peak. Verbal + social-emotional is a big valley. So I am good at mental rotation requiring lots of visual skill and less abstraction, good at raven's requiring less visual skill and more abstraction, good at standard iq tests biased towards verbal reasoning, good on the receptive side of social cognition tests like rmet, and horrible on the eggspressive side like telling a story about social things.

I seem to do very well with abstract reasoning as far as "correctness" goes, though it appears that I require more time to arrive at this "correctness" than the "average" person would require. Abstract Reasoning Tests take around forty-five seconds-to-a-minute per item, but I got seven out of eight of them correct (I did not yet attempt the "Hard" test).

You can hack your way through some visual reasoning problems that way, but your score will still be poorer than someone using a primarily visual method.

Same thing if you try to visualize your way through a verbal reasoning test.