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A recent study published in the journal Autism Research suggests that autistic individuals with average or higher cognitive abilities often develop daily living skills that match their intelligence over time. The findings provide evidence that when a gap between intelligence and life skills does occur, it tends to emerge gradually during childhood rather than being present from birth. This challenges the common assumption that autistic people with average or high intelligence will always struggle with everyday tasks.
When a child receives an autism diagnosis, parents naturally have questions about the future. Caregivers often wonder if their child will eventually live alone, attend college, or maintain a job. These questions can be incredibly difficult for medical professionals to answer. Developing a better understanding of how intelligence and practical skills evolve provides a foundation for answering those parental questions.
Daily living skills represent the practical tasks people perform to navigate everyday life independently. These skills include personal hygiene, household chores, and community tasks like using money or taking public transportation. These practical abilities form one part of a broader concept known as adaptive functioning. Adaptive functioning encompasses all the conceptual, social, and practical skills necessary for an individual to live autonomously.
Prior research suggests that these daily living skills tend to predict how well an autistic person might navigate adulthood. Specifically, stronger practical skills are often linked to positive adult experiences like securing employment and living independently. Because of this, scientists are highly interested in understanding how these abilities develop.
Study author Elaine Clarke, a postdoctoral associate at the LifeSPAN Autism Lab in the Graduate School of Applied and Professional Psychology at Rutgers University, noted that these practical abilities are a primary focus of her work.
“This is one of several studies I have led in recent years focused on understanding daily living skills (DLS) in autistic individuals,” Clarke said. “As an autism clinical researcher, I think DLS are among the most important constructs we can study. Independence in daily living skills during childhood and adolescence is associated with employment, social relationships, and other meaningful adult experiences.”
Many previous studies noticed a pattern in autistic individuals who possess an average or higher intelligence quotient, commonly known as IQ. These individuals often exhibited weaker daily living skills than one might expect based on their cognitive test scores. This gap is sometimes referred to as an intelligence to skills discrepancy.
“A long-standing assumption in autism research has been that many autistic individuals, particularly those with average or above-average IQs, show a large gap between their cognitive abilities and their daily living skills,” Clarke said. “We wanted to better understand how common and persistent those discrepancies actually are across development.”
Almost all of the existing evidence on this gap comes from cross-sectional research. A cross-sectional approach looks at a specific group of people at a single point in time. Because these studies only capture a snapshot, they cannot show how the relationship between intelligence and daily skills changes as a person grows.
The scientists designed the current study to observe these skills over an extended period. By following the same group of people from early childhood into adulthood, the authors aimed to see exactly when and how the gap between cognitive abilities and practical skills develops. They also wanted to see if early childhood traits might predict this gap. A final goal was to examine whether these developmental patterns affected adult experiences like employment, relationships, and overall well-being.
“Longitudinal studies require substantial time, funding, and commitment from participants and researchers alike,” Clarke said. “I think this work highlights why those investments are worthwhile. Autism is a developmental condition, and development is a dynamic, reciprocal process. In other words, autism influences development, and developmental experiences influence how autism is expressed over time.”
Clarke added that tracking participants over decades allows researchers to capture changing developmental pathways. She explained that this approach reveals interactions between a person and their environment in ways that cross-sectional studies simply cannot.
To conduct the research, the authors used data from the Longitudinal Study of Autism. The project began tracking children who were referred to clinics in North Carolina and Illinois before they were three years old. Later, additional children from Michigan joined the study at age nine. For the current analysis, the scientists included a specific group of 92 individuals.
All 92 participants had average or higher cognitive abilities by age nine. The participants also had complete data for cognitive and daily living skills from at least two different points in time between the ages of two and twenty-five. Data collection occurred when the participants were approximately two, three, five, nine, eighteen, and twenty-five years old.
At these check-ins, the researchers used a series of standardized tests and questionnaires. To measure cognitive ability, they used established intelligence tests designed for different age groups. To measure daily living skills, the scientists used an interview tool called the Vineland Adaptive Behavior Scales. This tool involves asking caregivers detailed questions about the participant’s ability to perform personal, domestic, and community tasks.
The personal domain includes self-care tasks like bathing and dressing. The domestic domain covers household chores and meal preparation. The community domain involves navigating public spaces and making purchases. This interview tool provides numerical scores that allow scientists to compare a person’s practical skills to those of typically developing peers.
To measure autism features, the researchers used a standard clinical observation tool designed to assess social communication and repetitive behaviors. When the participants reached their early thirties, the scientists collected information about their adult milestones. This included data on whether the participants were employed, had gone to college, lived independently, or had formed romantic and platonic relationships.
The authors analyzed the data by plotting the differences between each participant’s intelligence scores and daily living skill scores over time. They grouped the participants based on how these differences changed from early childhood to young adulthood. The scientists initially expected most people to show a large gap between their intelligence and their daily skills.
The actual data suggested a different pattern. The researchers found that the majority of participants, accounting for 57.4 percent of the sample, had daily living skills that consistently matched their cognitive abilities from age two up to age twenty-five. For this majority group, no significant gap ever formed between what they could understand and what they could practically do.
The remaining 42.6 percent of the sample fell into a second group, where their intelligence scores were notably higher than their daily living skill scores. For this subset of participants, the gap between intelligence and practical skills was not present at age two. Instead, the discrepancy emerged gradually over time, becoming more noticeable by middle or late childhood. The gap then tended to widen as the participants entered early adulthood.
The researchers also looked for early childhood traits that might predict which developmental group a child would join. They examined factors like maternal education, early intelligence scores, and the severity of autism features at age two. None of these factors successfully predicted whether a child would develop a gap between their intelligence and their daily skills.
The only factor that significantly predicted group membership was race. White participants were significantly more likely to fall into the group where intelligence outpaced daily living skills. Participants of color, who were predominantly Black in this sample, were more likely to be in the group where practical skills matched cognitive abilities.
Finally, the authors examined whether falling into either group affected how the participants fared as adults. They looked at employment rates, college education, living status, friendships, and reported happiness. The scientists found no significant differences in adult outcomes between the two developmental groups. Having a gap between intelligence and daily living skills did not seem to lower the likelihood of achieving these adult milestones.
“I think my coauthors and I were most surprised by the lack of associations between the IQ-DLS trajectory groups and adult outcomes,” Clarke told PsyPost. “Going into the project, I expected that autistic individuals with smaller gaps between their IQ and daily living skills would be more likely to be employed, living independently, and socially connected in adulthood.”
“Instead, we found no differences in employment, residential, social, or well-being outcomes at age 33 based on trajectory group membership,” Clarke continued. “One possible explanation, which we discuss in the paper, is that relative strengths in either cognitive ability or daily living skills may help support positive adult outcomes. However, larger studies will be needed to examine this possibility directly.”
These findings offer an optimistic perspective on development and learning for the autistic population. Clarke highlighted two main lessons she hopes the public will take away from the project.
“First, autistic people can learn life skills. It may take more time, support, and opportunities for practice than it does for neurotypical individuals, but we should not assume that being autistic means someone cannot learn to complete daily living tasks or live independently,” Clarke said.
“Second, IQ alone is not a good way to understand a person’s strengths, challenges, and growth potential,” Clarke said. “We should not rely solely on cognitive ability to infer what they may be capable of learning and achieving in the future.”
One potential misinterpretation of this study is the assumption that daily living skills do not matter for adult success. The lack of differences in adult milestones between the two groups does not mean practical skills are unimportant. Strong cognitive abilities might allow some individuals to compensate for weaker practical skills in certain situations. The broad categories used to measure adult success might also fail to capture the everyday challenges faced by these individuals.
The study possesses some limitations that warrant consideration. The tool used to measure daily living skills might present a drawback, as the caregiver interview is heavily weighted toward skills learned in childhood and adolescence. Missing data from participants who dropped out of the study over the three decades could have also influenced the final calculations.
“Participants were drawn from the Longitudinal Study of Autism (LSA), a unique cohort that has been followed for more than three decades,” Clarke said. “While this is a major strength of the study, it is important to remember that the cohort was established in the early 1990s. Diagnostic criteria, public awareness, and pathways to diagnosis have changed substantially since that time.”
Because the study spans such a long timeline, the age of diagnosis in the sample differs from modern trends. This could impact how the results apply to newly diagnosed patients today.
“Participants in the LSA were also enrolled at ages 2–3, which is younger than the average age of autism diagnosis in the United States today (approximately 4 years old according to recent CDC estimates; Shaw et al., 2025),” Clarke explained. “As a result, the autistic individuals in this study may differ in important ways from people who are diagnosed later in childhood, adolescence, or adulthood, and our findings should be interpreted with that context in mind.”
Future research should explore why the gap between intelligence and daily skills differs across racial groups. Scientists could use qualitative methods, like focused interviews, to see if families from different cultural backgrounds hold varying expectations for household chores and independence. Future studies might also look at larger and more diverse groups of people to see if these patterns hold true in the broader autistic population.
Going forward, the researchers plan to continue studying how practical abilities evolve throughout an individual’s entire life.
“Daily living skills are important throughout the lifespan and arguably become even more important in adulthood and later life,” Clarke said. “One area I am particularly excited about is understanding how daily living skills continue to develop during midlife and older adulthood, as interest in autistic aging continues to grow.”
The study team also sees promise in new methods to teach practical abilities to older patients who have complex needs.
“I am also encouraged by recent intervention studies showing that daily living skills can be improved in autistic adolescents (e.g., Duncan et al., 2022; 2026),” Clarke added. “I would love to see these efforts expanded to include younger children and autistic adults, including individuals with higher support needs, such as those with co-occurring intellectual disability or limited spoken language.”
The study, “Limited Discrepancy Between Cognitive Ability and Daily Living Skills in Autism: A Longitudinal Study From Ages 2–25,” was authored by Elaine B. Clarke, Catherine Lord, and Vanessa H. Bal.