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Author Spotlight: Exploring Autism Spectrum Disorder Symptoms in Fruit Flies — Genetic Models and Behavioral Tests
Published on: September 6, 2024
Autism: Common, heritable, but not harmful
Morton Ann Gernsbacher1, Michelle Dawson2, Laurent Mottron2
1Department of Psychology, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI 53706.
Abstract:
We assert that one of the examples used by Keller & Miller (K&M), namely, autism, is indeed common, and heritable, but we question whether it is harmful. We provide a brief review of cognitive science literature in which autistics perform superiorly to non-autistics in perceptual, reasoning, and comprehension tasks; however, these superiorities are often occluded and are instead described as dysfunctions.
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