Verbal vs. Performance IQ

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My PIQ varies between 115 and 135 depending on the test while my VIQ is always between 100 and 110.

I was diagnosed PDD-NOS at the age of 5, which was befere AS existed. Going by the DSMIV I meet the criteria for AS but never had enough traits to qualify as autistic. Therefore my most recent evaluation diagnosed me as having AS. According to the DSMIV most of the traits for autism are also listed under traits for AS, the only difference being that the requirements are less stringent in the case of AS. IQ discrepancies aren't taken into account at all in these diagnosis.

marshall wrote:

They aren't taken into account, individuals with below average (85 or under) FSIQ scores are rarely, if ever, given an Asperger's diagnosis.

Whether it SHOULD be legitimate to dx people with below average IQ's with AS when it would otherwise be warranted is a different matter. Some in this group have
(namely Callista if I remember correctly) argued that it should be legitimate to do so.
Whatever the case....i'm just going by the officialdom here.


I should add that people with below average FSIQ's CAN easily display the pattern of assets and deficits associated with NVLD. These in turn would likely have something in common with several AS assets/deficits. If the individual's IQ is 70 or less and they exhibit enough of the NVLD characteristics, they would probably be dx-ed with LD-NOS on Axis I and Mental Retardation on Axis II.

Though in the case of such people....any NVLD-related strengths and weaknesses would likely be relative ofcourse.

I've actually read a book called Finding Ben in which someone's VIQ was in the so-called "gifted" range, and their PIQ was 0. Unless I am misremembering. Which is probably the biggest spread you could get. He was dxed with Asperger's at some point after a lot of mixed-up psych misdiagnoses.

Wow...i've heard of that book several times, but a PIQ score of zero likely has to do with very exceptional extenuating factors in the case of the individual in question.

Consider the following from the Q&A section of Dr. Byron Rourke's website:





Question # 11

Does a Wechsler Verbal IQ>Performance IQ deviation of significant proportions signal the presence of NLD and/or right cerebral hemisphere dysfunction?

A conceptual error made by some clinical neuropsychologists is to consider symptoms and signs of disturbance in isolation from the context of the results of a comprehensive neuropsychological evaluation. This is particularly counterproductive in the case of NLD because one "symptom" of the syndrome (i.e., a Verbal IQ well in excess of a Performance IQ) can occur as a result of disturbances that have nothing to do with the NLD syndrome, white matter perturbations, or right hemisphere dysfunction.

For example, such a discrepancy may be seen in individuals who, for one reason or another, adopt a slow-but-accurate strategy on the Wechsler Performance "speeded" subtests (i.e., ignore the instructions to perform as quickly as possible). So too, persons with lower motor neuron disease and other afflictions that affect dexterity, but not higher cognitive functions, may obtain very low scores on the Performance scale; the same scenario, mutatis mutandis, obtains for the hard-of-seeing.

The list of reasons for doing poorly on the Wechsler Performance scale relative to the Verbal scale could go on and on. The important issue to bear in mind with respect to the analysis of the NLD syndrome is the following: All or virtually all of its elements should be present if the dynamics of the syndrome are to be clarified, and if forms of treatment that are thought to be suitable for persons who exhibit NLD are to be instituted with confidence.



http://www.nld-bprourke.ca/BPRA11.html

From what I understand, he just had very, very, very severe NLD.

In my experience the most difficult aspect of performance IQ tests is the time limit. I can't "work as fast as I can" for more than 20 minutes straight without losing focus for short periods of time. I also tend to spend more time than others of equal intelligence on the easier questions because I have to be extra cautious. If I'm forced to process information too quickly I make ridiculous mistakes even on easy questions. This is why I sometimes only score around 115 on some IQ tests even though most people think my IQ should be in the 130-140 range based on my academic abilities. In short, I don't think IQ tests are really fair to people who might process information differently. IQ tests are designed with NT's in mind.

I might have to order this book from Barnes and Noble or something. If none of the extenuating factors Rourke mentioned (or any he didn't) weren't present in the extreme, then yes, i'd say this is a case of profound NLD, white matter involvement/right-hemisphere dysfunction. Now I suppose "Ben" can compensate for his exceptional deficits to some degree thanks to his equally exceptional strengths. In the case of some with the NLD pattern of assets and deficts, this probably isn't the case. While their own verbal scores might be higher than their performance scores, they may only have relative verbal strengths.


This seems to be the case among many people with Williams syndrome for example. They often show some "global" impairments, but their verbal skills are relatively better than their visual-spatial/perceptual ones. In terms of my own NLD-related issues,i've been wondering about my consistently poor performance on the Block Design subtest (on the performance section.) That is, I wonder how much of that has to do with my processing speed.

I have always scored six or seven on Block Design on every WAIS i've had. The sevens were obtained on the tests in which my processing speed index score was relatively good (at 99 and 108) respectively. I just obtained a six on Block Design on the recent WAIS I had and my processing speed score on this one was 86. No matter what....I seem to be able to assemble the blocks correctly, but I often fail to do so within the alloted time frame. I am usually quite nervous during this test too because it's always been my second-lowest subtest score on WAIS. So nervous, in fact, that the proctors themselves often make note of it.


Thus....while I can't be certain...i'd guess my poor performance on Block Design has much, if not everything, to do with processing deficits. Particularily when it comes to deficits in visual processing. Nonetheless, I tend to perform poorly (though not AS poorly) on the Matrix Reasoning subtest, which is untimed. To complicate the matter even further, i've also obtained average, and even superior, scores on Matrix Reasoning on a few of the WAIS tests which included it.

*shrugs*

His trouble functioning is extremely severe (edited to add: extremely severe for someone with NLD, not necessarily by some absolute standard). I think he's spent his entire adult life in group homes and similar facilities. (Not that that's necessarily a measure of severity of trouble functioning, but that someone saw the need suggests something right there.) I don't remember everything from the book but I remember his mother saying that he couldn't do even some very basic elements of self-care, nor could he notice things like whether his clothing was filthy or even fully on his body. Unfortunately I don't remember more detail than that, and the book is a really depressing one. (I find it depressing not because of the severity of the problems depicted, but because his mother tried to be as realistic as possible in how she viewed him. For the vast majority of the book, she views him with the most extreme disgust I have ever heard an otherwise nonabusive mother admit to feeling towards her child. Towards the end she begins accepting him as he is. Because of that, it's a good read for those who may be starting from that viewpoint of disgust and need to understand that it's possible to view someone in a different way than that. I've recommended it to many people for that reason, and for the reason that it shows a dramatic change for the better in someone whose initial descriptions of her feelings made me shudder. But as someone who recognizes that he's human and ought not to be thought of that way from the beginning, it's pretty tortuous reading and not something I would voluntarily look through for details unless I was about to get a bath afterwards. There's certain things that are good to know can occur, but that trying to read about these attitudes in their rawest honesty can feel pretty filthy going at times.)

Wow, and people call me oblivious! I hope he had a happy ending at least and found an environment that works for him. I have met some people who were very happy in their group homes.

"Ben" sounds a bit like the late Kim Peek to me. I don't know if Ben had an eidetic memory like Peek's, but unlike Ben, I don't think Peek's VIQ was anything close to gifted. Kim Peek had complete agenesis of the corpus callosum (for one thing) and perhaps Ben had callosal agenesis (either partial or complete) as well. Some individuals with callosal agenesis seem to manifest a wide variety of rather extreme assets and deficits.

Okay I did a search-inside-book on Amazon and I got it wrong -- I was thinking the overall score, and what it was was the percentile score. His verbal score was in the 91-99th percentile and his nonverbal score was in the 1st percentile. So that's a verbal score of somewhere between 121 and 135, and a nonverbal score of about 65 (according to a web page I found anyway, although that's a more modern test than this was -- this was in the 1980s). So quite a gap, but nothing unheard of on a board like this one. They described this as a "profound neurological-cognitive impairment", which is probably where I thought they were talking IQ scores and not percentile scores (because normally "profound" in the context of IQ testing means lower than 20 or 30 or something like that, and my reading comprehension can be pretty awful; I'm also not accustomed to thinking of a split like that as "profound" anything). In the section of the book I searched to find this, he also mentions being able to read before he could walk, but that also isn't unusual on a board like this one.

Ok that explains it perfectly and I wonder why that possibility just didn't occur to me
Actually...my own scores weren't too different from his then on the most recent WAIS I had. My verbal comprehension index score was 136 and my perceptual-organizational index score was 79. Not at all unheard of on this board. Again...one poster said they scored 167 on VIQ and something in the 60's on PIQ. This person claims to be a nursing student too, so not everybody with these massive discrepancies winds up in a group home or something. Yeah...I was really taken aback by this "0" PIQ score and I knew SOMETHING was amiss with that. If the solution would've been a venomous snake....I would be dead Do you know if Ben is still residing in a group home or whatever? I suspect he might be able to attend college, get some sort of career and maybe achieve a bit more independence if he wanted to. Maybe not.....but thousands (maybe hundreds of thousands) of people in America probably have similar VIQ/PIQ discrepancies and many seem to be able to achieve just about anything they want.

I would be the last person to begrudge him if he can't or if he simply doesn't care to
"achieve" anything in the conventional understanding of the term, but i'm just wondering what he's up to currently.

I have no idea what he's up to. (And now, after finding the following, I still have no idea what he's currently up to but I know more than I did a minute ago about what he was up to before.)

At the end of the book (which is less scary to look at so I'm looking at it), he was happier than he'd ever been because he had friends, and was moving out on his own using SSI money. (Geez, did I get the ages wrong too? I might have. And I think I might actually be conflating him with someone else now. This is really embarrassing. Now you know my reading comprehension and voluntary recall suck.) His mom supposedly had a website but when I look for it, it's nowhere to be found. He himself used to have a website here. That's the last Internet Archive version of the site, from 2005. The last Internet Archive version of his mom's site is here, from 2004. His mom's website has a bunch of journal entries through 2004, and he seems to have gotten a job, which I certainly hope he still has.

Anyway, if you want to know more about his actual history instead of my misrememberings, you might want to read his mom's book. It's not something I'd deliberately read anytime soon after reading it once, but that's not because it's horrible, just because I don't like having people's undiluted ableism (even former-ableism) shoved in my face so strongly, especially when it's showing how other people might judge me or people I care about.

Thanks to LostInSpace and Horus for their answers. Especially for the link which is very useful though I understand why it's hard to know whether someone has AS or NLD since the two are pretty similar and some individuals may be borderline AS or borderline NLD. I guess NLD who have another disorder could be diagnosed as being AS too since they would meet the criteria.

Well, English isn't my native language, thus I have troubles understanding what they mean sometimes like this one :

"Nonverbal reasoning less developed than verbal". I did my research on google and found out that non verbal reasoning is usually what we call spatial tests, I even took some and found out that I did better than I'd guess. It seems that being unable of finding a place in town or confusing left and right as nothing to do with "spatial skills" as understood in these tests.
But this sentence is confusing since they actually says that in both cases verbal IQ is usually above PIQ, thus we can guess that non verbal reasoning may be slightly less developed than verbal reasoning in both cases.
I do not understand what they mean by "less developed", how much "less developed" is less developed ?

Why is there nothing written for "Trouble seeing the big picture" ?

I was also wondering whether someone could have both NLD and a form of dyslexia since the link says that they are always good spellers. It seemed to me that a lot of people who have a disability have another disorder, but that's probably because many people aren't diagnosed properly.

I also had troubles understanding what they meant by "pragmatic skills" in this sentence : Weak pragmatic or conversational language skills.

Yet, I also did my researches. Does that mean that people who have NLD tend to have more difficulties using language properly (syntax, social rules) than those who have AS ? Because from what I've read aspies tend to seem rude because they don't use language properly, meaning that they tend to ignore the social rules because they just don't get it.

(I defintely have weak pragmatic skills by the way).

There seem to be a big difference between ASD and NLD when it comes to nonverbal communication which I don't understand.
Impairments in the use of nonverbal communication, such as eye-to-eye gaze, facial statement, body postures, and gestures to regulate social interaction

Yet, nonverbal communication is part of pragmatic skills from what I've read, thus it would not be surprising to find someone who has been diagnosed with NLD having troubles with that.

Oh, by the way, is there any problem with the chart ? Because there are some empty lines and some answers don't seem relevant at all. I mean, I just got the impression that aspies didn't have to have a special interest while NLD did.
I changed the lines on Microsoft Word and it made sense yet I could be wrong since I haven't studied Mental Disorder properly lately. Yet, I still have empty lines... It's quite confusing.


By the way, I do agree with marshall. Most people who have a mental disability (dyslexia, dyspraxia, attention disorder, autism, etc.) but doesn't have obvious mental retardation cannot know their IQ from the test. Actually, even NTs can't truly know it because it may vary. I mean, right now I changed home, can't sleep enough, feel intellectually restrain and I'm pretty sure that even on an easy online test I would do poorly because of that while I could do much better another day. It also depends on how you interpret the questions, some of them are pretty confusing. Many intelligent people have seemed quite ret*d, by the way, many geniuses were not "normal", and I'm not considering their IQ.

My communication skills were never as good as my performance skills HUUGE discrepancy

My spatial reasoning was in the "superior range" but my verbal was in the 27th percentile - funny I teach a language lol!! ! The report said that a discrepancy like that put me in 1% of the population and that clearly I'm better at doing than verbalizing.