Interpretation of high VIQ - PIQ difference - NVLD

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My verbal is 99.6th percentile, and my test didn't have a performance component, but I had 10th to 20th percentile on most visual-spatial tasks. And I am male. I do well on math standardized tests (710 math SAT, 800 verbal) but struggle in math CLASSES due to inability to keep up with the visual aspect of the lecture.

Interpretation?

Yes. One of the reasons why individual abilities should be considered in therapy, or why subcategories should be maintained within the ASD domain. Also, it supports the idea that IQ subscale scatter is connected to social and communication problems. I wonder, though, what would be the connection to V > NV. Is it really that different? Is it NVLD or the 'real' Asperger's? Why DSM should include all autistics under ASD except those with large V > NV split, and place them in a newly introduced NVLD category? (which isn't going to happen, but some think it should)

Anyway, did you look at Figure 1 in the article? It demonstrates the IQ-distributions of the 4 groups pretty well. We really need more research in this direction.

Seeing as how humans (in general, as a species) are inherently wired to use language, it really doesn't surprise me that highly visual-spatial people would take a bigger hit in the social realm. Obviously, communication = socialization; therefore, lousy communication = lousy socialization.

Now, us NVLD types have noted social difficulties as well, which often resemble the difficulties of highly visual-spatial individuals, so, I'm going to reiterate what someone already noted in that different underlying etiologies may be leading to similar outward behaviors.

Just from personal observation around WP, I've noticed that VS (visual-spatial) people, while having similar social issues to HV (highly-verbal) people, said "social issues" seem to have a different "flavor." Also, folks with very above-average FSIQ, below-average FSIQ, or just significant "scatter" among the sub-tests all seem to run into trouble of some variety in the social sphere. I've been referring to it as "Extreme Brain Syndrome" in my personal lexicon.

However, getting back to VS people verses HV people, it would be interesting to compare our social struggles and see if we can't put a finer point on it.

For me in the V < NV group, my severe social deficits were caused by eberrything being processed only in the physically perceptual direction, not in terms of social interaction. Like not responding to name, that was because I heard the sound of my name and I knew that it was the sound for me, and that was the end. Therefore, no reaction. Or not looking where someone is pointing, that was because someone's arm/hand/finger moved, and I looked at the objects moving, and that was the end. No looking in the direction of the finger. Or initiating any communications, I did not do that, not in speech or gestures or moving someone's hand somewhere, because the idear of doing these things did not occur to me. I had no social or communication instincts, and it was like the social brain was missing from my brain.

One difference that I have noticed between me and a lot of people on WP is that a lot of people seem to have a lot more social cognition that I do. Many people seem to be able to analyze social situations and verbalize their analyses, which I can't do. I can only make vague statements about "social things", not knowing what the things are, and lacking a verbal representation of them in my mind. People also seem to make a lot of social interpretations of written materials from forum posts to newspaper articles, applying theory of mind to say what someone's motives were in writing something or what someone was thinking or implying. Sometimes, they get it wrong, but that happens a lot on NT forums too, so I wouldn't say that getting things wrong is just an autistic behavior. But the applying of the theory of mind in the first place is something that I don't do. Also, people have said that they have a set of social rules that they try to follow to fake NT. Again, I can't do, I suspect because these are verbal social rules that I lacked the verbal social brain to develop or apply.

So my problems in social interactions are that I don't think socially at all, and I have few thoughts about what other people are thinking, and the idear of having thoughts about other people's thoughts isn't happening in my brain. There was a big interpersonal clusterfark at my office recently. It lasted two months and drove eberryone else nuts, as they told me last week, but I was mostly oblivious to the whole thing.

The commonality between me and others with greater social cognition and verbal skills is that we all seem to have social problems, whatever they are that I can't verbalize, during real-time social interactions. I have the problems, because I am oblivious to eberrything social. Eberrything that is social to others is just physical to me.

One thing that a lot of people do, but I don't do at all, is pulling out dictionary definitions of words during debates. I suspect that this is a HV behavior. Words are unimportant and unreal to me. In my mind, there is the non-verbal representation of whatever things the words are labeling, and the words are the labels applied on top to name the thing. I am always going from things to words for things, but it seems like many people are thinking first in terms of words, then the things that the words refer to.

Heh.

For me, words are thoughts, and thoughts are things. Words always come first and take precedence over what they represent because my brain is primarily filled with words. I take very little notice of the physical realm. When my "internal monologue" is "speaking," everything else fades from my awareness........which, of course, causes it's own set of problems.

But thank you for answering. Your response is fascinating. I'm sure I'll find it useful when I'm communicating with VS-types.