IQ
Across the autism spectrum, perceptual performance and behaviours show
atypically robust prediction of intelligence (Girard et al., 2023).
Among IQ tests for autistic people, scores for the Raven’s Progressive
Matrices fare best, outperforming the fellow nonverbal Leiter
test (Courchesne et al., 2015),
which in turn outperforms the standard Weschler (Tsatsanis et al., 2003)
and Stanford-Binet (Groundhuis & Mulick, 2013) tests, especially for
people with lower verbal IQ (Nader et al., 2015; Soulières et al., 2011;
Bölte, Dziobek & Poustka, 2009). Autistic children deemed
“untestable” on standard tests often can complete the Raven’s Colored
Progressive Matrices and demonstrate autism-typical perceptual strengths
(Courchesne et al., 2015). Adaptations such as visual supports (Muchetti
et al., 2013), adjustments for attention (Courchesne et al., 2019), and
relaxed time (McGonigle-Chalmers & McSweeney, 2013) allow many
minimally speaking children to further improve performance.
Reading Facial Expressions and Words
Autistic people, especially
A-SOD, tend to have subtle difficulties perceiving motion (Takarae et
al., 2008). Neural response to shifts in but not static eye gaze in
infants predicts autism diagnosis by age three (Elsabbagh et al., 2012).
Similarly, autistic adolescents and young adults show atypical
neurological processing of videos of people and dynamic representations
of social stimuli, but not static images (Weisberg et al., 2014).
Consequently, slowing down facial expressions shows atypically strong
benefit for various autistic children’s ability to recognize (Gepner,
Deruelle, & Grynfeltt, 2001) and imitate them (Tardif et al., 2007;
Lainé et al., 2011).
Consider colored filters of an autistic child’s choice to support
reading a) words, and b) people. Colored filters overlaid onto words or
photographs showed significant benefit for improving autistic but hardly
typically developing children’s ability to read (Ludlow, Wilkins, &
Heaton, 2006) or interpret emotional expressions (Ludlow,
Taylor-Whiffen, & Wilkins, 2012; Whitaker et al., 2016). This aligns
with the notion that visual overload contributes to social difficulties
(Nyström et al., 2015; Wagner et al., 2016).
Tablets can help language-delayed autistics develop or complement speech
(Kasari et al., 2014), through their strong visual design. Indeed,
despite handwriting and motor impairment, perceptual reasoning but not
motor skills positively relates to hand-writing skill in autistic
adolescents but not typically developing peers (Fuentes et al., 2010).