Urocyon wrote a lengthy but very interesting post on abilities and the supposed loss thereof, especially in autistics. Even after multiple reads, I find it hard to digest all that she writes. However, I do already see quite a few misconceptions about autistic abilities, intelligence and “regression” that she addresses.
Firstly, people often suppose someone has lost a skill, when in fact they never had that skill, but they were never expected to have it, either. A lot of “regression” may in fact be explained by a lack of expected progress. To give just a tiny example, when I still lived in the independent living training home, I often found myself arguing over skills I’d presumably had before but no longer had. One of these involved the ability to plan a meal independently. In reality, I’d never done this and had always gotten help planning meals. What changed were not my meal planning abilities, but my staff’s expectations of them.
Changing demands can play havoc on one’s apparent skills on a very large scale, too. Just because I could easily plan for a test where I had to study 50 pages in high school, doesn’t mean I can plan to study 500 pages in college. In fact, I never planned for the 50-page study at all, but I need to if I need to study 500 pages. This may seem like a tiny example, but it is a big reason why keeping up with college academics is much harder than keeping up with high school academics, and I for that reason make a lot less progress at college.
Another misconception involves the idea that a high test score always indicates across-the-board ability. In truth, a single skill might enable a person to do well on a broad range of tasks at a certain age, when that same skill will not help a person as they get older. Amanda mentions in the comments that her IQ score dropped by half between the ages of five and 22. She attributes this to her hyperlexia, which enabled her to score in the 160s at age five, but wasn’t helping her anymore as an adult. Interest in and, hence, familiarity with the test items would also have an effect. For instance, I’m not sure I would still score as high on calculus as I did in childhood, because I had a special interest with it back then and haven’t in many years.
Changing environments can also influence apparent functioning. Put simply, if an autistic is in a too stressful environment for too long, they run the risk of burning out. I still find it hard to acknowledge that this overflowing happened to me in 2007, and I don’t use the word “burn-out”, because medically speaking that refers to very specific symptoms, which I didn’t display. However, I must admit that the change in environment from the training home to my own home, plus a lot of accummulated stress from when I lived at the training home, contributed to my psychiatric breakdown. It is of course possible that my self-esteem was ruined, that I was seeking attention, or any number of other explanations I’ve gotten from others, but you cannot simply dismiss the impact the change of environments had. It just wasn’t true that I’d always had the skills to live independently: until my institutionalization, I had always moved into less restrictive environments, and there was no way of telling beforehand whether I would be able to cope there.
As Urocyon highlights, all this becomes more complicated when you’re labeled gifted. Gifted kids are supposed to know better and be successful in almost every area. Furthermore, gifted kids aren’t supposed to lose skills. If you were once gifted, or scored as gifted on an IQ test, you should always display extraordinatry abilities. I find it somewhat ironic how a drop in measured IQ is seen as tragic when the child was intellectually disabled to begin with, yet as something unreal and impossible when the child tested as intellectually gifted to begin with. In both cases, a drop in measured IQ may indicate a loss of skills, and it may be an indication of a broader loss of abilities, but it may also indicate different developmental expectations, less familiarity with the test items, exhaustion, stress, or any other number of things. Similarly, if a person tests as highly intelligent, that may indicate they are actually highly intelligent – which does not say a thing about social, behavioral or daily living skills -, but it may also indicate they are just good at taking tests. There is no need to throw unwarranted and biased stereotypes at someone on the basis of a test score, even if these stereotypes are presumably positive.
The major IQ tests (The Wechsler scales and the Stanford-Binet) are designed using trials on the “normal” population, and are standardized on the “normal” population. There are very, very few people with quantitatively or qualitatively unusual abilities in the standardization populations.
IQ tests are designed to measure IQ best in people with IQs between about 70 and about 130. The vast majority of people have IQs in this range. IQs outside this range must be considered very carefully. Some IQ tests won’t even provide IQ scores above 145 or below 45. We know less about what very high or very low scores mean, in a practical sense.
I always chuckle when I hear that someone had a very high IQ as a child, because I had an IQ around 145 as a five year old, and now I’m not sure I could clear 120. My old Stanford-Binet manual shows that a seven year old with a mental age of 12 years would have an IQ above 160, but frankly, I don’t believe that anyone in the S-B standardization sample actually obtained such an IQ. In other words, what is in the tables is an extrapolation. In my experience as an IQ tester, if a subject were to post a score of “160″, I would just say it was very high, but not an indication that the child’s future IQ would be that high.
There is a statistical factor called “regression to the mean” which requires us to *expect* that extreme scores are most likely to be less extreme on re-measurement. This should be born in mind when viewing very high or very low IQ scores.
A drop in IQ, by itself, must be examined and interpreted in order to invest the right amount of concern. I have found that many test administrators take IQ scores and subtest scale scores at face value, and do not record and consider what the person does whild obtaining those scores. Qualitative analysis of why items are passed or failed is very important, expecially with subjects carrying unusual diagnoses.
I have tested many children and adults, with developmental disabilities, but only a few were diagnosed as autistic, and they were not “high functioning” autistic persons. I would recommend that anyone believing themselves to be autistic should keep in mind that IQ tests were not designed for them, and the IQ scores should not be accepted at face value. However, if one happens to be tested by a knowledgeable examiner, then qualitative results, relating test performance to everyday strengths and weaknesses, may be of considerable value.