Authors
Minshew NJ. Goldstein G. Siegel DJ.
Institution
Department of Psychiatry, University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, PA,
USA.
Title
Neuropsychologic functioning in autism: profile of a complex information
processing disorder.
Source
Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society. 3(4):303-16, 1997
Jul.
Abstract
Neurobehavioral theories of autism have hypothesized core deficits in sensory
input or perception, basic attentional abilities or generalized attention
to extrapersonal space, anterograde memory, auditory information processing,
higher order memory abilities, conceptual reasoning abilities, executive
function, control mechanisms of attention, and higher order abilities across
domains. A neuropsychologic battery designed to investigate these hypotheses
was administered to 33 rigorously diagnosed autistic individuals with IQ
scores greater than 80, and 33 individually matched normal controls. Stepwise
discriminant function was used to define the profile of neuropsychologic
functioning across domains. The neuropsychologic profile in these autistic
individuals was defined by impairments in skilled motor, complex memory,
complex language, and reasoning domains, and by intact or superior performance
in the attention, simple memory, simple language, and visual-spatial domains.
This profile is not consistent with mental retardation or with a general
deficit syndrome, but rather with a selective impairment in complex information
processing that does not involve visual-spatial processing. This profile
is not consistent with a single primary deficit, but with a multiple primary
deficit model in which the deficit pattern within and across domains is
reflective of the complexity of the information processing demands. This
neuropsychologic profile is furthermore consistent with the neurophysiologic
characterization of autism as a late information processing disorder with
sparing of early information processing.