1. Prevalence of Clinically and Empirically Defined Talents and Strengths in Autism.
- Author
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Meilleur, Andrée-Anne, Jelenic, Patricia, and Mottron, Laurent
- Subjects
ABILITY ,AGE distribution ,AUTISM ,CHI-squared test ,EXPERIMENTAL design ,INTELLECT ,INTELLIGENCE tests ,INTERVIEWING ,LONGITUDINAL method ,SENSORY perception ,QUESTIONNAIRES ,RESEARCH funding ,SEX distribution ,T-test (Statistics) ,THOUGHT & thinking ,LOGISTIC regression analysis ,DATA analysis ,TASK performance ,DATA analysis software - Abstract
Outstanding skills, including special isolated skills (SIS) and perceptual peaks (PP) are frequent features of autism. However, their reported prevalence varies between studies and their co-occurrence is unknown. We determined the prevalence of SIS in a large group of 254 autistic individuals and searched for PP in 46 of these autistic individuals and 46 intelligence and age-matched typically developing controls. The prevalence of SIS among autistic individuals was 62.5 % and that of PP was 58 % (13 % in controls). The prevalence of SIS increased with intelligence and age. The existence of an SIS in a particular modality was not associated with the presence of a PP in the same modality. This suggests that talents involve an experience-dependent component in addition to genetically defined alterations of perceptual encoding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2015
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