AN INVESTIGATION OF THE CALENDAR CALCULATION ABILITY OF A CHINESE CALENDAR SAVANT

A Chinese calendar savant was investigated on his exceptional proficiency in calendar calculation and his culture-specific talent of converting the Gregorian calendar to the Chinese calendar. Results did not support any one of the hypotheses of eidetic imagery, high-speed calculation, rote memorization, keying-off (anchoring) strategy, use of calendar regularities or monthly configuration as the only explanation proposed in earlier investigations. The savant's calculation ability is hypothesized to be brought about by his familiarity of the 14 calendar templates and the knowledge of matching the templates to every year. For dates that are beyond the 20th century, the calculation is by regressing the date to a corresponding year in the 20th century by additions or subtractions of 28 or 700 years with his accurate use of the simple operations in arithmetic. © 1991 Plenum Publishing Corporation.