Special ability in computing the day of week for given dates was observed in a 24 year-old male (FB) diagnosed with Asperger syndrome. FB performed almost flawlessly (98.2%) both with past and future dates, over a span of 40 years. Response latency was slower as temporal remoteness of future dates increased. Within the future timespan, FB's…

The present study was carried out to examine physiological arousal modulation (heart activity and skin conductance), across baseline and cognitive tasks, in females with fragile X or Turner syndrome and a comparison group of females with neither syndrome. Relative to the comparison group, for whom a greater increase in skin conductance was…

This study examined the hypothesis of superior quantification abilities of persons with high functioning autism (HFA). Fourteen HFA individuals (mean age: 15 years) individually matched with 14 typically developing (TD) participants (gender, chronological age, full-scale IQ) were asked to quantify as accurately and quickly as possible…

A Chinese mentally retarded calendar savant (age 19) was evaluated for his exceptional proficiency in calendar calculation including converting the Gregorian calendar to the Chinese calendar. Results did not support hypotheses of use of eidetic imagery, high speed calculation, rote memorization, or keying-off (anchoring) strategies. (Author/DB)

Time taken to count stimuli was compared among three groups each composed of 22 elementary-aged children (with autism, with moderate learning difficulties, and normally developing). Results suggest that children with autism showed a tendency toward an analytic level of processing. While groups differed on measures of counting speeds, children…

The possible use of a calendar algorithm was assessed in DBC, an autistic "savant" of normal measured intelligence. Testing of all the dates in a year revealed a random distribution of errors. Re-testing DBC on the same dates one year later shows that his errors were not stable across time. Finally, DBC was able to answer "reversed" questions that…