P I.Q. & V I.Q. Does Aspergers = LD's?

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I was just wondering this last night going to sleep. I read a report that said that people with Aspergers, have a significant difference between Performance IQ and Verbal IQ. (Being the Verbal is significantly higher). They found people with HFA did not have a significant difference between the two.

Since a gap between P. IQ and V. IQ also indicated LD's, does this not suggest that people with AS, also have LD's?

Anyone else have any input on this? My understanding was, not all people with AS DO have LD's, they are just highly co morbid...

It depends in which country you're in.

Non verbal LDs, usually. In a way, you can look at AS as a non verbal LD. It is the delta-IQ that is the problem more so than anything else. The unevenness creates a painful self-awareness of it. VIQ correlates to academic success and PIQ corrleates to work success.

There's not always a gap, either. I've had my IQ measured three times, and each time I get a very different IQ and a very different level of gap. The most recent one (from about five years ago) has my PIQ only one point higher than my VIQ. If you look at the parts I did average or above average on, there's two from PIQ and one from VIQ. If you look at the parts I did below average on, there's three from PIQ and four from VIQ. If you just looked at PIQ and VIQ, there would seem to be not a lot of scatter, but if you look at the individual subtests, there's a ton of scatter. That said, I really don't like IQ tests at all and don't think they measure much of anything other than the ability to take IQ tests.

I don't think that scatter comes from a "learning disability," I think it (and many "learning disabilities" scatter too) comes from looking at one kind of person in terms of the norms for another. IQ tests are normed on non-autistic people. It's like someone said, do you expect people to view a dog as having a spectacular tree-climbing deficit and an astounding splinter skill in fetching slippers? That's viewing a dog in terms of a cat's skills, and it doesn't work. Not that autistic people are a different species, but we have a different skillset. If autistic skills were the norm, then most non-autistic people would appear to have extreme subtest scatter. Viewing us as a non-autistic person with bits thrown on and bits torn off doesn't work.

Very True. I'm so tired of being measured in terms of "the average", or "the norm". I am simply not in such terms! That's like telling us to start at the number one, count upward by threes, and stop when we hit the number 11. When we pass 11 and keep going, we're told we failed the test. We're an incompatible series, or pattern, to NTs.

Aspies are like polygons. No matter how you change their number of sides, they're never going to be circles. And, no matter how you size a circle (an NT), you're never going to get a straight edge. (Sticking with this analogy: I think all Aspies have a different number of sides, and all NT's have different diameters.)

Your subset differences will skew your perceptions and in that respect it is important. It is important for children in school not to be expected to do things they are not capable of doing. It is a diagnostic test.

I have never done a full IQ test with being told the full results, but I have done a few more "thorough" ones (ones that include stuff like digit spans etc. not the Tickle type rubbish) online and all show spatial as the highest with with short-term memory as the lowest - unfortunately this means my PiQ is somewhat lower (because of short-term memory problems) than it *could* be, although it is usually close to/on a level with my ViQ. If my short-term memory was better it would more likely than not exceed it though.

But I always thought that in all LDs except for NLD the performance IQ was higher than the verbal IQ? So this would just explain why many (or all?) with AS also have NLD. The question would then be however, why also other LDs are highly co-morbid...especially since I've always thought that a high verbal IQ had to do something with a left brain dominance but a LD like dyslexia with a right brain dominance, so I don't really understand how these two can go together, just like I don't understand how NLD and AD(H)D can go together for the same reason.

Doing differently on different subtests isn't a sign of skewed perceptions, it's a sign of a totally different set of perceptions. Skewed assumes that "normal" perceptions are not "skewed" and all others are.

Also, one thing that IQ tests will not generally pick up on, is people who can do generally really well at one thing at a time on a particular day (or moment). So you'll get someone who does really well on Vocabulary but not well on Block Design one day, and then the next day they could do well on Block Design and not well on Vocabulary. That won't be picked up in the way most IQ tests are generally done.

Moreover, doing well on a particular subtest does not necessarily mean the same thing in one sort of person as in another, either, so you can't tell which skills a person is good or bad at just by how they do on the different subtests. I did below-average on the Vocabulary subtest, and that does indicate something, but it does not automatically mean that I have a small vocabulary or will do badly in school subjects requiring a lot of verbal skills. (It does mean that I have difficulty with word-finding when put on the spot and difficulty rapidly defining one word in terms of another. But another person might do below-average on Vocabulary because they have a smaller than average vocabulary, and that would look like the exact same score as mine, even though they and I had totally different skillsets.

I still maintain that most of what an IQ test measures is the ability to take IQ tests at that point in time, which can stem from so many different abilities as to be near-meaningless. Differences between subtests can give some information, but not necessarily the information everyone thinks it does. (I do happen to have a very standard autistic subtest pattern, though. Which is not about VIQ and PIQ but about the relation of specific subtests to each other.)

Last edited by anbuend on 23 Apr 2007, 2:16 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Most of the "right brain/left brain" stuff is not based in solid neuroscience at all, and simplifying a bunch of educational categories (some of which have more actual validity than others) into right brain/left brain tends not to be helpful.

I always thought that "serious" professionals didn't believe in that sort of thing but there's this guy on adders.org who is a South African ADHD specialist and he is convinced that ADHD is largely down to how the right hemisphere is so much stronger etc. It's hilarious when he tries to explain things that simply don't fit into this sort of view, his answers are so predictable I could probably write software that gives the same answers in his "experts" column. He's a nice chap and hats off for taking the time to answer people's questions, but he's so set in his ideas and views it's pretty painful

Really, that whole ADHD people are more right-brain-dominant and therefore are so creative and emotional bla bla is just crap? I've read that so often on the net and I think even in books that I wouldn't have thought that, or at least thought that it's a legitimate theory of many, but ok. Anyways, it's still like Aspies usually have a high verbal IQ and lower P-IQ and dyslexics for example a high performance IQ and low V-IQ, right? So what about a dyslexic Aspie, will he usually have a higher verbal or a higher performance IQ?
And by the way, generally I think IQ tests aren't of much use either, I like to do them just for fun like puzzles but that's it. Just as long as we don't know for sure what intelligence really is, I guess it stays like the IQ test measures intelligence and intelligence is what the IQ test measures as my psychology prof used to say