IQ and Social Skills May Be More Connected in Autistic Persons than in Neurotypicals
A higher general IQ correlates with better social functioning in autistic children but has no such relationship in typically developing children, a new study suggests.
While these findings aren’t entirely novel — previous work studying IQ in autism and neurotypical populations has suggested this finding in their results— this study does offer hypotheses for why this pattern keeps popping up in the literature.
The findings were published August 21 in PLOS ONE.
In the study, a group of 102 children with and without an autism diagnosis were assessed using the Kaufman Assessment Battery for Children and the Social Responsiveness Scale, measurements of intelligence and social cognition respectively. The completed measurements indicated that a higher IQ, more life achievement, a younger age, and being male were associated with better social cognition in children with autism. However, in the typically developing children, only older age — and nothing else — was associated with better social skills.
In other words, the more intelligent an autistic child, the more likely they would perform well on a social cognition task. However, in a non-autistic child, a high IQ was just as likely seen with low social cognition or high social cognition; there was no pattern to be found.
The researchers speculate the origin of these findings with two hypotheses. In one explanation, a higher intelligence could be associated with skills that facilitate social learning. As an autistic child is more likely to struggle with social learning, a higher IQ could be more essential to navigate their difficulties. Additionally, the researchers speculate that a higher intelligence could indicate masking: the children could simply be smarter at mimicking the behavior that appears in the presence of good social thinking. This camouflage effect is not uncommon. In other words, modifications to intelligence might not alter autism traits, but intelligence might compensate for or mask deficits in social cognition.
This study reveals the complex interaction between intelligence and social cognition, and that this interaction is not the same in autistic and neurotypical children. With deficits in social cognition being a hallmark trait of autism, this pattern in the literature is a major factor for psychology researchers to consider.
LINK: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0235380
