Children with Autism: Senses of sight and sound separated

Like watching a foreign movie that was badly dubbed, children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) have trouble integrating simultaneous information from their eyes and their ears, according to a Vanderbilt study published today in The Journal of Neuroscience.

Mark Wallace

The study, led by Mark Wallace, Ph.D., director of the Vanderbilt Brain Institute, is the first to illustrate the link and strongly suggests that deficits in the sensory building blocks for language and communication can ultimately hamper social and communication skills in children with autism.

"There is a huge amount of effort and energy going into the treatment of children with autism, virtually none of it is based on a strong empirical foundation tied to sensory function," Wallace said.

"If we can fix this deficit in early sensory function then maybe we can see benefits in language and communication and social interactions."

And the findings could have much broader applications because sensory functioning is also changed in developmental disabilities such as dyslexia and schizophrenia, Wallace said.

In the study, Vanderbilt researchers compared 32 typically developing children ages 6-18 years old with 32 high-functioning children with autism, matching the groups in virtually every possible way including IQ.

Study participants worked through a battery of different tasks, largely all computer generated.

Researchers used different types of audiovisual stimuli such as simple flashes and beeps, more complex environmental stimuli like a hammer hitting a nail, and speech stimuli, and asked the participants to tell them whether the visual and auditory events happened at the same time.

The study found that children with autism have an enlargement in something known as the temporal binding window (TBW), meaning the brain has trouble associating visual and auditory events that happen within a certain period of time.

Stephen Camarata

"Children with autism have difficulty processing simultaneous input from audio and visual channels. That is, they have trouble integrating simultaneous information from their eyes and their ears," said co-author Stephen Camarata, Ph.D., professor of Hearing and Speech Sciences. 

"It is like they are watching a foreign movie that was badly dubbed, the auditory and visual signals do not match in their brains."

A second part of the study found that children with autism also showed weaknesses in how strongly they "bound" or associated audiovisual speech stimuli.

"One of the classic pictures of children with autism is they have their hands over their ears," Wallace said.

"We believe that one reason for this may be that they are trying to compensate for their changes in sensory function by simply looking at one sense at a time. This may be a strategy to minimize the confusion between the senses."

Wallace noted that the recently-released Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition, (DSM-5), which serves as a universal authority for psychiatric diagnosis, now acknowledges sensory processing as a core deficit in autism.

Dyslexia - Multi-sensory Learning

We are creatures of great sensitivity and have the ability to understand things from many perspectives. The most effective teaching method for children with learning differences is to engage a multisensory approach. Multisensory teaching strives to utilise all the child's senses, to relay information or convey meaning to the students.

The teacher accesses the auditory, visual, and kinesthetic pathways to enhance memory and learning because they know that by using as many sensory paths as possible the more likely that the message will be understood and be absorbed.

For example, when learning the vowel combination “oa” the student might first look at it and then have to trace the letters in the air while speaking out loud.

This combination of listening, looking, and moving around creates a more lasting impression for the student. Relationships and connections between items and events, will become more memorable and concepts can be built up.

Multisensory learning started back in the 1920s by Dr. Samuel Orton at the Mobile Mental Health Clinic in Iowa. Dr. Samuel Orton, one of the first to recognise, what we now call 'dyslexia' in students.

He suggested that teaching the “fundamentals of phonic association with letter forms, both visually and kinesthetically presented and reproduced in writing, until the correct associations were built up,” would be the best learning approach for students of all ages.

Dr. Orton had his patients trace, copy, and write letters whilst saying their corresponding sounds and associations. Today this method is known as multisensory learning.

Children experiencing dyslexia often struggle with auditory and/or visual processing. They have trouble recalling words and how they are pronounced. This means that they do not comprehend the roles that sounds play in words.

These children have difficulties rhyming words as well as blending sounds together to form words. Children who experience dyslexia, do not understand or acquire the alphabetic code. They are unable to grasp and retain the 'simple' repetative learning and memorising systems expected of them in the primary grades.

If a child with dyslexia is given a task that uses just hearing and vision, without drawing upon other senses, the student will be at a disadvantage. When taught with a multisensory approach, children will learn alphabetic patterns and words by utilising all pathways – hearing (auditory), seeing (visual), touching (tactile) and moving (kinesthetic).

Dyslexic students do not need more of the same instruction in class but a different type of instruction. They need to learn basic language sounds and the letters or letter combinations, that are used to make them. Becuase you are engaged in a building process, you need to starting from the very beginning and move forward in a gradual but logical, step by step process, which builds on the previous step.

For this to be retained, the children need to be taught to do this by using their eyes, ears, voices, and hands. We are a sensitive multi-talented creature that enjoys stimulation, challenge and achievement. Children experiencing Dyslexia are no different from the rest of us. They need to be stimulated, challenged and be able to feel that other great sense, the sense of achievement. Something we all crave and enjoy when we succeed in learning a new skill.

Conficious Proverb
Tell me, and I will forget.
Show me, and I may remember.
Involve me, and I will understand.