Numbers and Letters: Exploring an Autistic Savant's
Unpractised Ability.
Pring L, Hermelin B.
Psychology Department, Goldsmiths College, University of London, London SE14
6NW, UK.
This paper describes an individual with autism and high-level calendar
calculation ability who could perform a set of unpractised letter/number
association tasks. The savant's performance was compared with that of two
control participants, one a departmental secretary and the other a professor of
mathematics. The facility with which the savant could master the rules governing
the relationships between the series of items suggests that he possessed a
flexibility of mental processing transcending his ability of calendar
calculation. Furthermore, he could recalibrate previous knowledge to solve new
hitherto unpractised tasks. When presented with novel problems, the savant,
unlike the mathematician, made no initial errors at all on any of the presented
tasks, thereby indicating his fast and spontaneous recognition of new rules and
of new relationships between items. It is concluded that a cognitive style of
'weak central coherence' as adopted by autistic savants may protect single
representations from being retained in the form of stable enduring wholes, and
that such a segmentation strategy may allow for the transformation,
reorganization and reconstruction of the relationship between single items of
information.
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