Mysterious but Exceptional Abilities with Autism

How is it that some people with autism can have some truly extraordinary abilities and indicate exceptional intelligence in certain areas, and yet require so much assistance in daily activities? This is one of the conundrums of autism: the ability to excel in specific skills, but the practical application of these very same skills is another story. Our students who are verbal offer us some glimpses into their unique world and cognitive processes. But we also have a program full of children and young adults, many of whom have unique traits and remarkable talents who are non-verbal with significant communication difficulties. We can generally ascertain their language receptive skills by how they respond to us, but gauging what or how much they truly understand remains an enigma. This we have to guess through those fleeting moments when it is as though the fog lifts and there is clarity. Even with technology and AAC devices, the initiation of communication is typically the hold up.

We have long known that many of our non-verbal students can learn to read, not phonetically, but through their strong visual memory and perception skills. And the acquisition of math skills can be equally mysterious with some of our students. While we struggle to teach one-to-one correspondence or other math concepts, we shouldn’t overlook the fact that the student may well be beyond us in understanding concepts. But how to get that information out and make it useful is our difficulty to surmount. It doesn’t particularly seem to bother our students that we don’t know what exactly they really do know.

A recent article published in Nature by Dr. Laurent Mottron at the University of Montreal's Centre for Excellence in Pervasive Development Disorders notes that many autistics have qualities and abilities that are superior, but he doesn’t necessarily refer to them as ‘savants’ as so many others do. Dr. Mottron’s research team was searching to establish the superior abilities of autistics in multiple cognitive operations such as reasoning and perception. He analyzed a group of autistic people, one of whom, Michelle Dawson, was able to describe her thinking process, which was obviously very helpful to the research. Michelle Dawson's interpretation of autistic strengths is that they are indicative of authentic intelligence rather than a serendipitous trick of the brain that allows persons with autism to mindlessly perform intelligent tasks. Dr. Mottron suggests that among the many reasons people with autism have been assumed to have mental retardation is the administration of inappropriate tests and the misinterpretation of autistic strengths. While some people with autism evidently do have limited cognitive abilities, just how limited they really are is not at all clear.

So, if its not a fluke or trick, how do we capture that knowledge and help our students make it useful? Perhaps instead of focusing on things people with autism don’t seem to know, we should instead be helping to create more opportunities to demonstrate what they do know or are capable of. And this may be the advantage of newer technologies. We have computers, AAC devices, and iPads with some wonderful programs that can illustrate a conceptual level of understanding that no pencil and paper assessment can mimick. For the most part, our whole focus on programs and devices is to foster communication, which obviously is important. But we shouldn’t sacrifice the opportunity to explore their other abilities and knowledge, however obscure. Then, the next critical step would be to figure out how to access that learning in a way that would be functional and constructive. In my opinion, that’s where the next research should be heading.