IQ and intelligence

iVillage Member
Registered: 02-24-2004
IQ and intelligence
1
Sun, 02-19-2006 - 10:43pm

I posted a question on a site regarding Nathan's IQ and intelligence and being HFA. They finally responded, and it was interesting what they had to say...so I thought I'd share:

High functioning autism (HFA) are children who are autistic by
definition
yet are able to communicate, do not have overly severe social
impairments,
and have only minor deficits in autism. Their IQ ratings are near
normal,
normal, or even high, so you may have an answer here. I believe HFA is
sometimes used in the same thought as Asperger's Syndrome.

Have you tested your son's IQ? It is quite possible that your son to be
above average in terms of intelligence and this is not surprising for
children diagnosed with HFA. It is also possible that you son is gifted
and
his giftedness being masked due to the labeling. I believe that this is
not
something that came at a later age, but has probably been there, just
unidentified. This may be the case also because giftedness and HFA don
not
always work together. Sometimes the characteristics of one syndrome
simply
take over the other. Gifted HFA may unintentionally engage in behaviors
that
provoke a ridiculing or teasing reaction from others in part because
they
lack the perspective to see their actions as inappropriate.

The main distinction between highly gifted children and those with HFA
are;
the highly gifted are usually socially isolated, independent of peers,
advanced and sophisticated vocabulary, use complex cognition and
advanced
understanding as opposed to HFA individuals who are generally more
socially
incompetent, unskilled with peers, hyperlexic, use simple cognition and
advanced memorization.

With the right intervention, the HFA child can learn to overcome his
difficulties and eventually be mainstreamed into a regular classroom.
People
often have misconceptions of HFA children that they are unable to
accomplish
or even learn many tasks if the reflect low IQ scores. This is not true
since measuring the IQ of such children cannot be done with any degree
of
accuracy. Many factors, such as distractions in the testing environment
as
well as their level of hyperactivity may interfere with the test
taking.
Sometimes, the child may just require more time to respond along with
some
visual input to help clarify a question. This is especially true since
autistics tend to think in more visual terms than most people do. It is
also
true that they tend to have a much higher performance IQ compared to
verbal
IQ.

It is a fact that if literature is reviewed, it is often indicated that
truly outstanding in any field may be associated with some type of
abnormality. Therefore, perhaps, a little bit of autism genes may
provide an
intellectual advantage and too much of the genetic may cause a severe
case
of autism.

Regards
Inderbir

iVillage Member
Registered: 09-09-2005
Mon, 02-20-2006 - 11:39am

This is so interesting as Liam has a lot of those traits.

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