Are animals autistic savants?
A new article published by PLoS Biology explores this question suggested by Temple Grandin.
Vallortigara G, Snyder A, Kaplan G, Bateson P, Clayton NS, et al. (2008) Are Animals Autistic Savants. PLoS Biol 6(2): e42 doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.0060042
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. Here 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. Autistic savants show extraordinary skills, particularly in music, mathematics, and drawing. Do animals sometimes show forms of extreme (though, of course, different) cognitive skills confined to particular domains that resemble those shown by autistic savants? 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 also 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? We argue that animals, like nonautistic humans, process sensory information according to rules, and that this manner of processing is a specialised feature of the left hemisphere of the brain in both humans and nonhuman animals. Hence, we disagree with the claim that animals are similar to autistic savants. However, we discuss the possibility that manipulations that suppress activity of the left hemisphere and enhance control by the right hemisphere shift attention to the details of individual stimuli, as opposed to categories and higher-level concepts, and can thereby make performance more savant-like in both humans and animals. (Editors note: See Box 1 for Grandin’s response.)
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