Are animals autistic savants? ask researchers Giorgio Vallortigara et al. in the February 19th PLoS Biology. Yes, indeed says Temple Grandin in her 2005 book, Animals in Translation: Animals and autistic savants—who have extraordinary skills in certain areas, and especially in mathematics, music and drawing—both have “extreme cognitive skills” and also “think in detail” based on their processing of sensory-based data. Vallortigara et al consider these claims from the perspective of specialists in animal cognition and critique what Grandin says:
We argue that animals, like nonautistic humans, process sensory information according to rules, and that this manner of processing is …read more