The Matrix of Autism

Autistic children* are doubly stigmatized. On the one hand, they are often dismissed as “low functioning” or mentally retarded, especially if they have poor speaking skills as many do. Yet when autistics do show exceptional abilities—uncanny visual discrimination and memory for detail, for example—their flashes of brilliance are marginalized as aberrations, mere symptoms of their higher order cognitive deficit. They often earn a dubious promotion to “idiot savant.”

This seems unfair. It’s kind of like cutting a sprinter from the track team because he is either too slow or too fast. The theoretical justification for this view is that prototypical autistic skills are not true intelligence at all, but really just low-level perceptual abilities. Indeed, in this view autistics are missing the big picture because they are obsessed with the detail. The trees for the forest if you will.

But is this true? Are autistics really incapable of abstraction and integration and other high-level thinking? Surprisingly, given how pervasive this view of autism is, it has never been rigorously tested. Autistics have been tested out the wazoo, but a team of scientists in Canada suspected that the tests themselves might be baised. They decided to explore the idea in the lab.

Led by psychologist Laurent Mottron of the University of Montreal, the team gave both autistic kids and normal kids two of the most popular IQ tests used in schools. The two tests are both highly regarded, but they are very diffierent. The so-called WISC relies heavily on language, which is why the psychologists were suspicious of it. The other, known as the Raven’s Progressive Matrices, is considered the preeminent test of what’s called “fluid intelligence,” that is, the ability to infer rules, to set and manage goals, to do high-level abstractions. Basically the test presents arrays of complicated patterns with one missing, and test takers are required to choose the one that would logically complete the series. The test demands a good memory, focused attention and other “executive skills,” but—unlike the WISC—it doesn’t require much language.

The idea was that the autistic kids’ true intelligence might shine through if they could bypass the language deficit. And that’s exactly what happened. The difference between their scores on the WISC and the Raven’s test was striking: For example, not a single autistic child scored in the “high intelligence” range of the WISC, yet fully a third did on the Raven’s. Similarly, a third of the autistics had WISC scores in the mentally retarded range, whereas only one in 20 scored that low on the Raven’s test. The normal kids had basically the same results on both tests.

The scientists ran the same experiment with autistic and normal adults, with the same result. As they report in the August issue of Psychological Science, these findings speak not only to the level of autistic intelligence but to the nature of autistic intelligence. While it is probably true that autistics possess extraordinary perceptual skills, and that they use unique cognitive pathways for problem solving, their intelligence clearly goes far beyond rote memory and perception to include complex reasoning ability. That won't come as any surprise to Michelle Dawson, who is autistic. She is also a scientific collaborator on this study.

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*Like the scientists who did this study, I am adopting this respectful usage. For an explanation, see Jim Sinclair’s essay, “Why I Dislike ‘Person First’ Language.”
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For more insights into human nature, visit “We’re Only Human . . .” at www.psychologicalscience.org/onlyhuman.

How To Make the Big Decisions in Life

Every autumn, the members of my extended family compete in an NFL football pool. It started modestly years ago, as a paper-and-pencil affair for my three sons and me, but now nieces and cousins and in-laws all over the country participate via Internet. It’s great fun.

I’m not all that good at it. I don’t follow the game that closely anymore, and I am competing against some true students of the game, including a sports writer. But I don’t embarrass myself either, and I’ll even win the week every so often. My method? Pure hunch. (That and blinkered loyalty to my hometown Redskins, of course.)

By hunch, I don’t mean my sister’s method, which is choosing her favorite uniforms and cities she’d like to visit someday. That’s bush league. No, this is higher order cognition, something to do with gauzy glimpses of the past and a sense of comfort. I’d call it a gut feeling, except it definitely feels like it’s in my head.

Well, it turns out it is in my head, and psychologists even have a jargony name for it: recognition heuristic. I had to look heuristic up. It’s a kind of algorithm for the brain’s neural network, a simple, fast formula for a particular kind of decision making. With the football pool, for example, you could choose winners deliberately, weighing each team’s off-season trades, performances against other teams, factoring in injuries from the past week, the weather in Minneapolis, and so forth. My brother-in-law actually does that. But you could also ignore all that information and pick the team that resonates in your neurons, the one you recognize with a sensation of sureness. That’s what a lot of people do, including me, and not just for football. Psychologists have studied it, and it’s not a bad system on balance. Indeed, we have to rely on such "unconscious intelligence" just to get through the day. Most decisions have lots of variables, and we just don’t have time to calculate them all.

People use a variety of heuristics to negotiate life. Another common one, described by psychologists Peter Todd and Gerd Gigerenzer in the June issue of Current Directions in Psychological Science, is the so-called “default heuristic,” which basically says: If there is a default position, don’t question it. Consider the fact that only 28 percent of Americans are potential organ donors, compared to 99.9 percent of the French. Why would this be? Do the French have a particular character trait that predisposes them to give? Is their moral training superior? Perhaps there is an altruism gene that runs in the population? Todd and Gigerenzer think the answer is much simpler, and lies not in the mind but in the world: In most U.S. states, the default position is no-donation; you must actively choose to be a donor by signing something. In France it’s the opposite. And because it’s easier for the brain to default than not, we rarely stop to weigh the choices. We have other decisions to make.

While such rules are efficient and pretty accurate, people must intuit where a particular rule is an appropriate and valid fit with whatever life is dealing us at the moment. And people do use heuristics inappropriately sometimes, and thus make mistakes. Consider what the psychologists call the “take-the-best” heuristic. This life rule is a fast and frugal heuristic that relies on a single reason for a complex decision—say choosing a romantic partner. When you are in take-the-best decision-making mode, you search through the available cues in order, one at a time, but you stop searching as soon as you have enough information to make a rational choice. To use Todd and Gigerenzer's language, you are "satisficing," satisfying enough to suffice.

When you are picking a partner, there are a few resume details that are extremely important, followed by some more that are less important but still worth thinking about, and then a lot that are relatively unimportant. So: Intelligent? Check. Sexy? Check. Funny? Check. Successful? Check. That seems like enough to go on. You rarely get far enough down the list to weigh the unimportant things. If you do, best guess is you’re single. Then again, something you’re not weighing now may seem a lot more important later on. Kind? Oops. Didn’t check that. And that’s a big oops, because this ain’t no weekend football pool.

For more insights into the quirks of human nature, visit "We're Only Human . . ." at www.psychologicalscience.org/onlyhuman.

Plumbing the Mediocre Mind

We don’t really know very much about intellectual mediocrity. Scientists haven’t showed much interest in the dull average mind, and novelists, probably because they’re smarter than most of us, tend to write about smart people. They might be cruel or neurotic, but they’re smart. Or they romanticize the dull-witted as inspired daydreamers like Don Quixote or Walter Mitty.

But what about more typical workaday dullards? What does the texture of their interior lives feel like? What’s it like to be the C+ student grown up?

Psychologist Michael Kane has begun exploring the mediocre mind using the tools of cognitive psychology. Working with his colleagues at the University of North Carolina in Greensboro and the University of Maastricht, in the Netherlands, Kane used a battery of tests to assess the working memory of young adults. Working memory is considered a fairly good proxy for intellectual acumen generally; it is closely linked to comprehension and learning ability, and is probably tied up with “executive” skills like goal setting and staying on task.

The participants in the study were all students at the university, so none were stupid. But some were clearly sharper than others. Once Kane had sorted the volunteers according to intellect, he had them participate in a “beeper study.” Beeper studies are a well established way of sampling everyday experience. Volunteers carry a beeper (actually a Palm Pilot in this study) around with them, and the scientists beep them at random intervals. In this study, they were beeped eight times a day, between noon and midnight (these were college students after all) for seven days. Each time they heard a beep, they answered a brief questionnaire about what they were doing and thinking.

The scientists wanted especially to get a sense of how engaged the participants were in everyday life. Most of our lives are a mix of fascinating, less fascinating, dull and downright boring activities, and we all “zone out” at times. But do slower minds wander more than sharper minds? Are some of us muddling through our days as space cadets, our thoughts wandering every which way? And if so, where do they go?

Well, they do wander more, but perhaps not as you would expect. As reported in the July issue of the journal Psychological Science, the dull-witted report drifiting not when they are bored, but rather when their minds are overtaxed by some unusually challenging task. It’s like they don’t have the mental resources to stay on task, so they stop striving. Their minds are escaping more than wandering.

And where do they go? Well, the good news is that they are not worrying. Few of the slower participants reported being distracted because of troubles elsewhere. The bad news is that they were not really daydreaming either, not in the sense of indulging wild or even interesting fantasies. Their thoughts were pretty humdrum;
they were subbing one tedious detail of life for another.

This is obviously just a snapshot of the mediocre mind in action. The C+ mind needs and deserves a lot more scientific attention. After all, most of us occupy that great unwashed center of the curve, so wouldn’t it be instructive to understand us better? I’m sorry, what was I saying? Excuse me, there goes my beeper.



For more insights into the quirks of human nature, visit "We're Only Human . . ." at http://www.psychologicalscience.org/.

Sudoku in the Saloon?

I was recently listening to two state troopers as they shared anecdotes about their time in police work. They were both longtimers, with more than 50 years of service between them. At one point, one asked the other: In all your years, did you ever get involved in a fight with anyone where there was not drinking involved? The second trooper took about five seconds to reply: No, not once.

The link between alcohol and aggression is well known. What’s not so clear is just why drunks get belligerent. What is it about the brain-on-alcohol that makes fighting seem like a good idea? And do all intoxicated people get more aggressive? Or does it depend on the circumstances?

University of Kentucky psychologist Peter Giancola and his colleague Michelle Corman decided to explore these questions in the laboratory. One theory about alcohol and aggression is that drinking impairs the part of the brain involved in allocating our limited mental resources—specifically attention and short-term memory. When we can only focus on a fraction of what’s going on around us, the theory holds, drunks narrow their social vision, concentrating myopically on the provocative cues and ignoring things that might have a calming effect.

The scientists tested this idea on a group of young Kentucky men. Some of the men drank three to four screwdrivers before the experiment, while others stayed sober. Then they had them all compete against another person in a somewhat stressful game that required very quick responses. Every time they lost a round, they received a shock varying in intensity. Likewise, when they won a round they gave their opponent a shock. The idea was to see how alcohol affected the men’s belligerence, as measured by the kinds of shocks they chose to hand out.

But there was more to it. Giancola and Corman also deliberately manipulated some of the volunteers’ cognitive powers. They required them—some drinkers, some not—to simultaneously perform a difficult memory task. The idea was to see it they could distract those who were “under the influence” from their “hostile” situation. If they could tax their limited powers of concentration, perhaps they wouldn’t process the fact that someone was zapping them with electricity.

And that’s exactly what happened. As reported in the July issue of Psychological Science, the drunks who had nothing to distract them were predictably mean, harshly shocking their adversaries. But the drunks whose attention was focused elsewhere were actually less aggressive than the non-drinkers. This seems counterintuitive at first, but it’s really not: The sober men were cognitively intact, so they would naturally attend to both provocations and distractions in the room, resulting in some low level of aggression.

It appears that alcohol has the potential to both increase and decrease aggression, depending on where’s one’s attention is focused. The psychologists speculate that working memory is crucial not only to barroom behavior, but all social behavior, because it provides the capacity for self-reflection and strategic planning. Activating higher level mental activity in effect reduces the “cognitive space” available for hostility.

So last call. Do we get rid of the pool cues and hand out Sudoku in Kentucky saloons? I have a feeling that strategy wouldn't work, but I’d like to ask those state troopers. I bet they would say that a true drunk can and will make a fight out of anything.

For more insights into the quirks of human nature, visit “We’re Only Human . . .” at www.psychologicalscience.org/onlyhuman.