The Cognitive Profile of People with High-Functioning Autism Spectrum Disorders | Hacker News Reader

The Cognitive Profile of People with High-Functioning Autism Spectrum Disorders

ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

91 pointslainon20 comments

I’ve not been diagnosed with ASD, but I did have to take parts of the Wechsler a few years ago. My results were lopsided, as this paper describes. My doctor was surprised at how fast I completed the block design and matrix reasoning parts. He said he had never seen them completed so quickly. Yet, my verbal scores were relatively low. I did similarly on the SATs - I perfected the math section but did horribly on the verbal parts.

I have challenges processing words. I strain to use them. It feels like I’m translating from one language to another over a couple layers. Then again, I didn't begin speaking until I was 3. So, maybe I missed some developmental stages.

But, I often wonder if I have ASD. Reading this paper reminded me of it. Is there any benefit in getting a diagnosis?

> Is there any benefit in getting a diagnosis?

For me, unquestionably. I got my first and current full-time position at a very well known technology firm through their hiring program for autistic individuals. Through that program I also met a mentor who became a very good contact of mine, specifically because she has an autistic son and understands the condition to a better extent than just anyone I might find on my own. Because I struggled with social contacts in college I find she's the one person I can really associate with. From experience, I would say having hiring programs oriented toward people with a diagnosis makes work-related things feel much more sane, and in more ways than just the material benefits it provides, because in my case it feels like the people who put them together understand the things people like me struggle with and try their best to account for them.

Besides that I personally found that having a diagnosis makes events in my past that made me feel completely ostracized from my surroundings make far more sense in retrospect. Now I'm more aware of societal/mental issues I might have from reasonably established consensus, and I try to factor them into how I act toward people and myself.

There is the argument that they're still just mistakes to learn from, diagnosis or not, but after I merely became aware of the condition I thought, "Hmm, that describes me pretty well in some ways." After that I felt like I was limited in the past by not understanding that I might in fact have some similar mental inclination, and instead attributing more things that went wrong to factors in my control. I guess in some ways it's less about the diagnosis than understanding you might be inclined to act in some way due to things outside of your control (which can of course be changed with enough practice).

I've been diagnosed at a young age and didn't speak until I was 5. I still have symptoms but have been able to improve myself enough for people to just think something is off about me. Managed to graduate college with a 4.0 GPA. Near the end I thought about doing grad school but knew I would need accomodations because I am very slow at reading and writing. I seen a psychologist to get a more recent diagnosis and instead he diagnosed me with Learning Disability.

I took the woodcock-johnson iv tests of cognitive abilities with him and that test showed my writing speed was equivalent to that of an 8 year old. But in the section related to visual-spatial ability he said I had a perfect score, he said he never seen someone get that good of a score before on those sections. I qualified for accomodations but ultimately decided to just enter the workforce instead of continuing to go to school.

I think it's possible you could have enough symptoms to qualify as being on the spectrum but honestly I don't think a diagnosis would really make any difference in your life. It sounds like you are already aware of your weaknesses and strengths. If you need accomodations for something related to your weaknesses you might be able to get a diagnosis that could help you get them.

Some people think a diagnosis might help them better understand themselves and why they are different but I just think of ASD as a term to describe how I am different rather than it being something that causes/explains why I am different.

I have a similar VIQ/PIQ imbalance. I guess that my verbal IQ is around 100, while my non-verbal (performal) IQ might be as high as 130. I have a lot of trouble with spelling, remembering rot facts, and recalling names of people (even people I have know for a long time). But I am very good at map reading and navigating. I consider myself an abstract, visual thinking. I usually can work out complex algorithms in my head before coding them. I have no problem reading code and execute it in my head.

I get the impression that the VIP < PIQ imbalance is rather rare (at least compared to the VIP > PIQ imbalnace) and it might be the case that the imbalance may interfer with some of the test that are being used to establish a ASD diagnoses, because these test presume a balanced IQ profile. One example of such a test is the 'faux pas' test, which is a verbal test for 'theory of mind'. You might score low on this test (indicating ASD), while have an excellent ability to figure out that other people have a complete different mental picture of a complex programming problem, that you understand that they do not understand some aspect that you do understand and that you do not understand why they cannot understand it in the way you do. (This kind of things have been driving me crazy even doubting myself about my understanding of the problem.)

> Is there any benefit in getting a diagnosis?

A dx can help explain your life and things that happened to you and how you respond to stuff.

It can be useful if you need to ask people for reasonable adjustments.

Very good to have on the job. Employers will take advantage of autistic work habits, attention to detail, lack of time wasted with water cooler talk, etc. But you need to have a diagnosis in hand to get an accommodation or a free pass when you say something stupid that you are not supposed to say.

> Is there any benefit in getting a diagnosis?

Maybe there are "support groups* of like minded people you could get in touch with, at least?

Perhaps you simply haven't worked all that much on verbal-related skills, compared to quantitative ones. Have you tried e.g. using Anki to expand your vocabulary?

It’s not the vocab that’s the problem. It’s more like a problem of ‘translating’ an abstract idea into words and vice versa. It’s like there’s an extra few steps that my brain has to do.

> It’s more like a problem of ‘translating’ an abstract idea into words and vice versa.

Yes, this is called verbal fluency - the ability to recall the right words at the right time, so as to produce those words effectively. It is quite distinct from purely receptive vocabulary since that deals with word recognition alone, but it's a highly trainable skill nonetheless.

This seems to be quite a dense paper, I’ve just scrolled through thid study of Iranian children, although the sample size of 30 seems quite low.

However since I’m learning statistics this is the first time I’ve noticed the use of the Kolmgorov-Smirnov test in the wild, so I’ll be trying to go through it in more detail to see how K-S is used from a different angle.

The statistics for this paper are pretty straight forward. The sample size is small, so recovering a significant effect with frequentist hypothesis tests like MANOVA with 30 samples is challenging. However, the authors went to great lengths to filter out subjects with confounding factors. So even though the final sample size is small, it's intentionlly focused on the main effects of the study.

Ok, so can you say the results? Spent a couple minutes reading and still have no idea what they are trying to say.

I think the most interesting conclusion is that ASD (particularly "High Functioning" ASD) may actually be ADHD. Clinicians should do more rigorous testing to differentiate ASD and ADHD in their patients. Also, they add that "High Functioning" may not be a useful label. ASD is ASD. They demonstrate that IQ tests alone aren't that great a tool for comparing intelligence for people with high-functioning ASD vs typically ASD. But that some differences in subjects emerge when you use other measures of intelligence. They add that "subjects with high-functioning ASD showed a good competence in Matrix Reasoning and weaknesses in Comprehension." This means that people with a high-functioning ASD may be better at reasoning through complex spatial problems (like puzzles, mazes, matrix operations and linear algebra, solving rubix cubes :P) than a typical person with ASD.

They also note that the prevalence of ADHD symptoms and diagnoses are unusually high in ASD populations (37-85%). You can see the how strongly correlated ADHD symptoms are with ASD in their indices in their Tables 1 & 5 -- look at the negative effect with comprehension that's shared with typical symptoms in people with ASD's in table 5.

So, if you are a high functioning Aspie -- you may actually just be ADHD. And in other cultures, your profile may look very different than what is manifested in the West. Maybe shedding that label is important to you. It isn't to me.

It might be useful to you to know that your post was dead. I vouched for it, but you might have triggered some screening criteria.

Thx, mate. I'm a TOR user. Happens all the time.

Line plots to compare categorical variables? Please don't. (Scatter plot with text labels or bar plots would work so much better!) The only worse way is to use radar plots.

Based on what I've read and personal experience, there seems to be a significant amount of overlap between ASDs, ADHD, OCDs, and bi-polar. I wouldn't be surprised if there's a significant amount of underlying complexity we're missing that ties these disorders together.

The common characteristic seems to be a deficit in executive functions and cognitive control. Individuals have a lower ability to autoregulate their emotional state, making them less able to deal with frustration, and more vulnerable to compulsive behaviors, addiction, anxiety, and depression.

i believe this, too. essentially: paying attention to things and trying to make sense of them drives you crazy. the world only has pockets of order. you have to act crazy/stupid in many cases. it's hard to align strategy with situation. society is a mechanism for cataloging these strategies, but demands equal payment. you have to help them to get them to teach you which mode to be in. and they're still wrong often. just knowing this can drive you crazy.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com