What is the IQ that seperates HFA from LFA?

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i was told when i was a child by my psychiatrist that there was such a thing as "medium functioning autistic" (MFA), so there is no threshold between HFA and LFA, but rather, there is a threshold between HFA and MFA, and another one between MFA and LFA.

i was told that i had asperger syndrome by my psychiatrist in 1984 when i was 12, but she could not diagnose me with it because it was not yet ratified into the DSM, so i was diagnosed HFA,

she said that "high functioning autistics" are able to take care of themselves and live alone, and they are able to assume responsibility for their actions entirely. there sappears to be an impairment of cognitive faculties that relate to interpersonal identification, and therefore the most obvious situational deficit is the sparseness of the "friend" base.


she said that "medium functioning autistics" are locked down at a much more narrow level of consciousness. MFA people can learn by rote the entire schematic diagrams of machinery, and quickly decide the correct course of action to take in the event of failures in the machinery.

a typical MFA may be a farm hand who knows almost nothing bout the outside world, yet keeps the tractors in superlative condition. he may know every component in the all the tractors (and and their tolerances and peculiarities).
is not necessary i would think to mention that they have no friends (except for curious interlocutors).
they are not generally capable of thinking outside the "square", so self regulated life is not usually possible for them, they must usually be stewarded through life.

LFA people are people who have little ability to interact with the world at large (i was told).
they may be able to learn things as complicated as setting a table with cutlery, or arranging sizes of things. they are cognizant of the outside word to the degree that they perceive "approval" and "disapproval", but they are not aware of how to manipulate to any degree what people think of them by interaction. LFA people must be cared for by others.


there is even a level more serious, and it is called "profound autism", and it is a complete disconnection between the subject and their relationship with objects.

profoundly autistic people can not feed themselves or go to the toilet because they have not incorporated even the basics of objective resolution (satisfaction) of their desires in their minds.

profoundly autistic people are condemned to a life of either obliviousness or bewilderment.


as to the IQ's? she also told me a few thing about that

most HFA's score above 70.
most MFA's score above 40
most LFA's score below 40.

that is what i was told, and i just reported it (in an extremely abbreviated way), and i claim no input to what i report, so see it as you will.

That's very helpful thanks & interestng too

These numbers seem suspicious to me. Anything under 70 is considered deficient. This alone would push one's functional abilities to the low end. Add autism on top of that and it would compound the difficulties.




Additionally, testing autistics with traditional IQ tests is not very informative, either. There are too many examples of people that test very low in IQ but once they develop an avenue of communication turn out to be quite intellectually active.

What do you mean by "the low end"? I hope you aren't one of those people who thinks that scoring 50 on an IQ test and dressing oneself are mutually exclusive.


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So you allow that non-verbal people may have scored low due to communication difficulties. However, communication difficulties are not the only reason to score artificially low. Non-compliance, taking things extremely literally, devoting one's intelligence to things that are not on the test are all reasons as well. There are probably more.

b9's description of the middle range gave a good example of somebody who scores low because all their intelligence is focused ultra-narrowly on one thing.

No. I just can't think of a word that fits. "Low end" is a bit sloppy, but in the context of IQ ranges it is adequate. Regarding IQ and dressing, one could score much higher than 50 and still have trouble dressing.




I used communication as only one factor. You are correct that many other things come into play as well. This is really the point, isn't it? It seems that IQ tests only tell us how a narrow set of measures relates to the general population. This isn't very informative. That said, even with all the weaknesses of IQ testing, there are correlations between IQ and functioning levels. This becomes its own problem because too often professionals turn this correlation into invariant truth and fail to see it as just an indicator of future potential.

That is a problem. Professionals (people in general) think that skills come bundled and autism makes it clear that they don't. IQ tests get used as a proxy for all sorts of cognitive skills not actually measured by the test because of this assumption. They think that if a person can answer IQ test questions A,B,C correctly then they also have cognitive skills X,Y and Z. And if they can't, they don't.

IQ tests would be so much more useful and meaningful if the subset scores remained independent of each other. Those are the scores that measure specific skills rather than trying to make everybody be a point on a line.

Alfred Binet would facepalm if he saw what happened with the test he developed. He never meant for it to be like this.

My younger stepson is classic Autistic Disorder, and does communicate at least a little. So Low- Functioning Autism is definately NOT always non- verbal.
I thought some time back that he did some things that were similar to me, but never expected that I would be diagnosed on the Autism Spectrum, myself...