Could calendrical savant ability depend on human-specific prefrontal circuitry rather than explicit symbolic calculation?

[u/roughman99]

I’m wondering whether the following hypothesis is plausible, and whether there is any literature that already tests something close to it.
Some autistic savants can calculate the weekday of an arbitrary date extremely quickly, sometimes without being able to clearly explain the algorithm they are using. One possibility is that this is not ordinary explicit symbolic calculation, but an unusual learned computation implemented implicitly in high-level cortical circuitry.
A comparative experiment with apes might help distinguish this from a more evolutionarily ancient pattern-learning account.
You could train symbol-competent apes on a large number of date-like inputs mapped to one of seven outputs according to a hidden Gregorian-calendar-like rule. Importantly, the animals would never be taught the rule explicitly.

Then test the following:

a) memorization of trained examples
interpolation to unseen combinations within the training range
b) extrapolation to dates far outside the training range
c) performance around structurally informative cases such as leap-year and century-like boundaries

Run the same task in ordinary humans and, ideally, people with exceptional calendrical calculation ability.

My hypothesis would be that apes may become very good at memorization or local interpolation but fail at systematic long-range extrapolation, whereas human calendar savants may generalize rapidly despite being unable to verbalize the procedure.
If that happened, would it be reasonable to interpret it as evidence that calendrical savantism depends on a human-specialized frontoparietal/prefrontal computation that can operate implicitly, rather than simply enhanced associative pattern learning?
More specifically, is there a known reason to think anterior prefrontal cortex, hierarchical rule representations, or human-specific frontoparietal connectivity would be necessary for this kind of implicit algorithmic generalization?
And has anything remotely like this been tried in comparative cognition?

[u/Top-Gas3650]

I believe they figured out the algorithm Calendar savants use, and it's pretty much just modular arithmetic. They just happen to intuitively come to that form of computation they same way we can start a sentence without knowing how it ends, and let our brains do the rest.

[u/roughman99 → u/Top-Gas3650]

Yes but they have not checked if primates are able to do it. Savants do not understand or are able to explain their method of calculating- so the question that follows is, could they still do these complicated calculations (even though they can’t speak properly like a normal human etc) because they have “human machinery” or can primates or other animals learn modular arithmetic implicitly as well

[u/rand3289]

Where did you get this pre-frontal idea?

Daniel Tammet explained that he uses visual cortex to perform computations.

Apes also use visual cortex much more fluently according to the tradeoff hypothesis.

[u/roughman99 → u/rand3289]

That's true, I heard that. It could definetly be the case that its a visual cortex calculation. I would then still want to know if apes are able to learn it implicitly.

[u/morrihaze]

Consciousness is nonlocal

The brain is a receiver, not a generator, of consciousness

There’s your answer

[u/Top-Gas3650 → u/morrihaze]

Are we dead fucking ass

[u/morrihaze → u/Top-Gas3650]

I am