COMPUTATION ABILITIES IN NONSAVANT AUTISTIC SUBJECTS

The present study aimed to evaluate the presence of dissociations in c omputation skills, in a group of high-functioning autistic patients. W e used the NECO-Battery (1994) which separately assesses each sub-comp onents of number processing, arithmetical and numerical abilities. Pre liminary results failed to reveal dissociations between the different tasks under investigation. The autistic subjects showed intact perform ance on all of the battery's tasks. These results incite the need for detailed case-studies of prodigious autistic calculators with more sen sitive paradigms, like chronometric tasks, in order to reveal possible dissociations in the computation abilities.