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Savant abilities may represent the autistic equivalent of what "expertise" is for non-autistic individuals. Special abilities would use a bottom-up instead of a top-down choice of domain of application, involve different domains of information, substitute self-reward for social reward, make a different use of perception and memory, and rely on implicit rule extraction vs. explicit learning. Savant abilities rely also on different relations among the various cognitive operations involved in their accomplishment, and entertain a unique relation with general intelligence. We now hypothesize that the development of savant ability requires five distinct components, including an encounter with a perceptually defined class of units, a brain-behavior cycle, expertise effects, implicit learning, and generalization to new material.
Special abilities operate on series of perceptually defined units that are rigidly defined for each savant but present the same phenomenalistic properties for all savants. Even if special abilities may sometimes reach a high level of abstraction, we contend that they are all "rooted" by their composition in series of perceptually recognizable elements. The choice of these units is plausibly constrained for the entire autistic population, as indicated by the very high level of similarity of special abilities all over the world. These units appear to satisfy the following phenomenal criteria: they are presented in orginazed patterns (books, calendars, phonebooks, mechanical objects; tonal melodies, prayers, lists); they share a high level of perceptual similarity across time and space (letters for hyperlexia, digits for calculators, letters and digits or calendar calculators, 2-D of 3-D visuo-perceptual properties for savant mechanists and draftsmen, pitches for savant musicians); and they belong to a defined combinatorial series (digits, letters, "geons", chromatic scale).[...]
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