Intelligence Structure of Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder and Children With Mild Mental Retardation

Abstract

According to statistics in recent years, there has been a steady increase in the number of people with autism spectrum disorders (ASD), characterized in particular by disorders in the field of socio-psychological relations and specific changes in the cognitive sphere that impede the course of natural psychological adaptation. The theories of the origin of autism advanced in Western psychology are the theory of mind, the theory of central binding (central coherence theory) and the hypothesis of the weakening of the so-called. executive functions and individually and combinatorially quite adequately linked to the recorded changes from the three morphological-functional blocks according to A.R. Luria. The diversity, and sometimes the inconsistency of the obtained morphometric data in autistic children (regarding the total size of the brain, gray and white matter of the cerebral hemispheres, commissural structures, the hippocampus, tonsils, cerebellum, etc.) correlate with the same high diversity and sometimes bizarre manifestations intellectual activity — from pronounced forms of mental retardation to a very high, although unusual in structure of cognitive development. Correct construction of technologies for working with such children and their effective integration into the system of socio-psychological relations, or specific adaptation to it, is impossible without taking into account the intellectual potential and a differentiated approach based on both general and individualized laws of the child’s cognitive development. We made an attempt to compare the traditional characteristics of the intellectual activity of children with autism spectrum disorders and children of the same age with mental retardation (MA) in order to identify general and specific trends in their cognitive development. For this, the well-known Veksler test was used, which ensures the comparability of experimental data with normative data for the corresponding age group. It was found that children with ASD statistically significantly “gain” in the performance of those mental functions that involve the use of optical-spatial gnosis and constructive praxis, but expectedly “lose” in cases that require modeling behavior in social situations and taking into account everyday experience.