Counting, Cardinality and Conservation in Autistic Children.
Irene Polo-Blanco, Raúl Fernández-Cobos, Agustín Vicente
PMID 42489138WHAT IT FOUND
Autistic children aged 4 to 7 counted as accurately as peers and understood how many items were counted, but were slower and lower on tasks about whether rearranged objects kept the same number.
They used pointing and counting aloud more.
Key findings
01Autistic children had lower conservation scores and longer response times than non-autistic children at the mean age.
02Cardinality and counting accuracy did not differ significantly between groups.
03Verbal counting with pointing was the most common strategy for 28 autistic participants, and quick non-verbal counting was the most common strategy for 32 non-autistic participants.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they found
Read the rest of this summary
You get three full summaries a month, free, and we do not ask for a card. Search, the TL;DRs and your library stay unlimited either way.
What it does not show
The study compared different children at one time, so it cannot show how conservation develops or whether autistic children are delayed. There was much more variability in the autistic group than in the non-autistic group, so a single average may not describe all autistic children. Subitizing was not directly measured, so the lower use of quick non-verbal counting cannot be treated as a proven subitizing deficit. Non-verbal IQ was available only for the autistic group, so intelligence could not be controlled for in the non-autistic group. The autistic group had no additional psychiatric comorbidities and non-verbal IQ 70 or higher, so results may not apply to autistic children with intellectual disability or co-occurring conditions. The study cannot separate the effect of autism from a higher prevalence of dyscalculia. Autistic children were assessed at research centres, while non-autistic children were assessed at schools.
Declared interests
This work was supported by projects PID2022-136246NB-I00 and PID2021-122233OB-I00, funded by MICIU/AEI and FUNLAT. The authors declare no conflicts of interest.
The easy way to misread this
Do not read the conservation difference as proof that autistic children have a general mathematics deficit or that a therapy can improve conservation. The study was cross-sectional, did not directly measure subitizing, and showed large variability within the autistic group.