Low intelligence and special abilities.

Abstract

In summary, our research enables us to conclude that specific talents are found in people who differ widely in general intelligence levels and such talents should therefore be regarded as at least partly intelligence-independent. However, between normal and mentally handicapped populations and even within the idiot savant group, general cognitive capacity plays some part in determining the manner in which talents manifest themselves. Idiot savant special abilities can neither be regarded as the sole consequence of practice and training, nor are such skills based only on an efficient rote memory. Instead, idiots savants use strategies which are founded on the deduction and application of rules governing the material upon which their special ability operates. They also generate novel or new examples of such rule based structures just as we do in our use of language. Because of the much greater prevalence of idiots savants in the autistic than in the mentally handicapped population, some characteristic common to both autism and specific giftedness might be assumed. An obsessional pre-occupation with a limited section of the environment might be a common factor to both. It may be this rather than autism itself which is relevant to the idiot savant phenomenon.