Cognitive and Developmental Functions in Autistic and Non-Autistic Children and Adolescents: Evidence from the Intelligence and Development Scales–2

Abstract

Autistic individuals often show impairments in cognitive and developmental domains beyond the core symptoms of lower social communication skills and restricted repetitive behaviors. Consequently, the assessment of cognitive and developmental functions constitutes an essential part of the diagnostic evaluation. Yet, evidence on differential validity from intelligence and developmental tests, which are commonly used with autistic individuals, varies widely. In the current study, we investigated the cognitive (i.e., intelligence, executive functions) and developmental (i.e., psychomotor skills, social–emotional skills, basic skills, motivation and attitude, participation during testing) functions of autistic and non-autistic children and adolescents using the Intelligence and Development Scales–2 (IDS-2). We compared 43 autistic (Mage = 12.30 years) with 43 non-autistic (Mage = 12.51 years) participants who were matched for age, sex, and maternal education. Autistic participants showed significantly lower mean values in psychomotor skills, language skills, and the evaluation of participation during testing of the developmental functions compared to the control sample. Our findings highlight that autistic individuals show impairments particularly in motor and language skills using the IDS-2, which therefore merit consideration in autism treatment in addition to the core symptoms and the individuals’ intellectual functioning. Moreover, our findings indicate that particularly motor skills might be rather neglected in autism diagnosis and may be worthy of receiving more attention. Nonsignificant group differences in social–emotional skills could have been due to compensatory effects of average cognitive abilities in our autistic sample.