Calendar calculation: A systematic review of 100 years of research
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Calendar calculation is the ability to answer rapidly to questions such as "What day of the week was May 12, 1978?" or "For which years is February 15 a Monday?" This ability is mastered by some "savant" autistic people with a surprising level of speed and accuracy. The quasi-specificity of calendar calculation in autism justifies its importance for understanding autistic information processing and learning mechanisms and is informative of certain extreme possibilities of human cognition. A registered (PROSPERO: CRD42021254855) systematic review was conducted using PRISMA guidelines, generating 76 articles (1920–2023) documenting 105 calculators (95 M). We examine: the clinical characteristics of calculators, their cognitive performances, the development and the behavioral correlates to the ability, the empirical findings on calendar calculation, as well as the overall available brain imaging results during calendar tasks. Our findings indicate that calendar calculation is associated with autism and is typically acquired implicitly and in an autodidactic manner, often during school age. Participants tend to demonstrate superior cognitive abilities in their area of interest compared to other domains. When assessed using standardized tools, their performance generally falls within the low full-scale IQ range. 49.5 % had a total calculation range under 100 years. Distance and priming effect were not consistently found showing performance variability. Brain imaging results highlighted three different neural networks that were activated during calendar tasks: memory, visual and arithmetic. This knowledge enables us to establish the common characteristics of calendar calculators and identify gaps in knowledge related to the acquisition of calendar calculation. • We review characteristics of all published cases of calendar calculators. • Calendar calculation is a special ability documented in only 98 individuals over 100 years. • 89.8 % of the cases are male and 76 % have at least one feature of autism. • Calendar calculation is mostly self-learned and noticed during school age. • Information about the development of the ability is lacking.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".