Abstract
Are Animals Autistic Savants
Highlights
Similarities in behaviour between autistic savants and animals have been suggested, most notably by Temple Grandin [1] in her book Animals in Translation (2005), and this theory seems to have gained some consensus among other neuroscientists who are not specialists in animal cognition
When Grandin proposed similarities in cognition between autistic savants and animals, she reasoned on the basis that animals, like autistic humans, sense and respond to stimuli that nonautistic humans usually overlook
Animals respond to and remember the details of the world around them, whereas nonautistic humans overlook the details in favour of the overall whole
Summary
Giorgio Vallortigara*, Allan Snyder, Gisela Kaplan, Patrick Bateson, Nicola S. We aim to discuss two specific parallels between the behavioural characteristics of animals and those of autistic savants that have been raised in relation to Grandin’s book. We argue that the extraordinary cognitive feats shown by some animal species can be better understood as adaptive specialisations that bear little, if any, relationship to the unusual skills shown by savants. It has been argued that autistic savants “think in detail”, and that this is the key to their extraordinary skills. Do animals have privileged access to lower level sensory information before it is packaged into concepts, as has been argued for autistic humans, or do they process sensory inputs according to rules that pre-empt or filter what is perceived even at the lowest levels of sensory processing? Stimuli, as opposed to categories and higher-level concepts, and can thereby make performance more savantlike in both humans and animals. (Editors note: See Box 1 for Grandin’s response.)
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