Creativity in savant artists with autism

Background: Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) often display impairments in creativity, yet savant artists with ASD can produce highly novel and original artistic outputs. To date, there have been no systematic attempts to explore creativity in savant artists with ASD. Methods: Nine savant artists with ASD were compared with nine talented artists, nine non-artistically talented individuals with ASD, and nine individuals with moderate learning difficulties (MLD), on tasks in and out of their domain of expertise. This was to ascertain whether the performance of the savant artists was related to their artistic ability, their diagnosis of ASD or their level of intellectual functioning. Results: On a drawing task (the Torrance Test of Creative Thinking; Torrance, 1974), the responses of the art students were more creative (scoring higher on measures of fluency, originality, elaboration and flexibility) than the savant, ASD and MLD groups. However, the savants did produce more elaborative responses than the ASD and MLD groups. On a non-drawing construction task (figural synthesis; Finke & Slayton, 1988), the savants produced more original outputs than the ASD and MLD groups (scoring similarly to the art students). No group differences were found regarding fluency on this task. Conclusions: On standardised creativity tasks, savant artists with ASD display high levels of elaboration (on drawing tasks) and originality (on non-drawing construction tasks), relative to groups with ASD or MLD. High elaboration and originality may result from a local processing bias, coupled with artistic talent, in this group

Improved Linear Cryptanalysis of Reduced-Round MIBS

MIBS is a 32-round lightweight block cipher with 64-bit block size and two different key sizes, namely 64-bit and 80-bit keys. Bay et al. provided the first impossible differential, differential and linear cryptanalyses of MIBS. Their best attack was a linear attack on the 18-round MIBS-80. In this paper, we significantly improve their attack by discovering more approximations and mounting Hermelin et al.'s multidimensional linear cryptanalysis. We also use Nguyen et al.'s technique to have less time complexity. We attack on 19 rounds of MIBS-80 with a time complexity of 2^{74.23} 19-round MIBS-80 encryptions by using 2^{57.87} plaintext-ciphertext pairs. To the best of our knowledge, the result proposed in this paper is the best cryptanalytic result for MIBS, so far

Episodic but not semantic order memory difficulties in autism spectrum disorder: Evidence from the Historical Figures Task

Considerable evidence suggests that the episodic memory system operates abnormally in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) whereas the functions of the semantic memory system are relatively preserved. Here we show that the same dissociation also applies to the domain of order memory. We asked adult participants to order the names of famous historical figures either according to their chronological order in history (probing semantic memory) or according to a random sequence shown once on a screen (probing episodic memory). As predicted, adults with ASD performed less well than age- and IQ-matched comparison individuals only on the episodic task. This observation is of considerable importance in the context of developmental theory because semantic and episodic order memory abilities can be dissociated in typically developing infants before they reach the age at which the behavioural markers associated with ASD are first apparent. This raises the possibility that early emerging memory abnormalities play a role in shaping the developmental trajectory of the disorder. We discuss the broader implications of this possibility and highlight the urgent need for greater scrutiny of memory competences in ASD early in development

Single electron quantum tomography in quantum Hall edge channels

We propose a quantum tomography protocol to measure single electron coherence in quantum Hall edge channels and therefore access for the first time the wave function of single electron excitations propagating in ballistic quantum conductors. Its implementation would open the way to quantitative studies of single electron decoherence and would provide a quantitative tool for analyzing single to few electron sources. We show how this protocol could be implemented using ultrahigh sensitivity noise measurement schemes.Comment: Version 3: long version (7 figures): corrections performed and references have been added. Figures reprocessed for better readabilit

Free Recall Learning of Hierarchically Organised Lists by Adults with Asperger's Syndrome: Additional Evidence for Diminished Relational Processing

The Task Support Hypothesis (TSH, Bowler et al. Neuropsychologia 35:65–70 1997) states that individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) show better memory when test procedures provide support for retrieval. The present study aimed to see whether this principle also applied at encoding. Twenty participants with high-functioning ASD and 20 matched comparison participants studied arrays of 112 words over four trials. Words were arranged either under hierarchically embedded category headings (e.g. Instruments—String—Plucked—Violin) or randomly. Both groups showed similar overall recall and better recall for the hierarchically organised words. However, the ASD participants made less use of information about relations between words and more use of item-specific information in their recall, confirming earlier reports of relational difficulties in this population