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 Linked to Brain’s Inconsistency with Encoding Sound

Researchers from Northwestern University report that they have found a biological mechanism that appears to play a vital role in learning to read.

This finding provides significant clues into the workings behind dyslexia — a collection of impairments unrelated to intelligence, hearing or vision that makes learning to read a struggle.

As many as one in 10 children is estimated to suffer from this disorder.

“We discovered a systematic relationship between reading ability and the consistency with which the brain encodes sounds,” said Nina Kraus, Hugh Knowles Professor of Neurobiology, Physiology and Communication.

The report, titled “Unstable Representation of Sound: A Biological Marker of Dyslexia,” is published in the Journal of Neuroscience.

For the study, researchers recorded the automatic brain wave responses of 100 school-aged children to speech sounds.

 They discovered that the very best readers encoded the sound most consistently while the poorest readers encoded it with the most difficulty.

The brain’s response to sound appears to stabilize as children learn to successfully connect sounds with their meanings.

On a positive note, biology is not destiny. In a previous study, the researchers found that the inconsistency with which the poorest readers encoded sound could be “fixed” through training.

In that study, children with reading difficulties were fitted for a year with assistive listening devices that transmitted their teacher’s voice directly into their ears.

After a year, the children made improvements in reading as well as in the consistency with which their brains encoded speech sounds, especially consonants.

“Use of the devices focused youngsters’ brains on the “meaningful” sounds coming from their teacher, diminishing other, extraneous distractions,” said Kraus.

“After a year of use, the students had honed their auditory systems and no longer required the assistive devices to keep their reading and encoding advantage.”

According to Kraus, people rarely have difficulty encoding vowel sounds, which are relatively simple and long.

It is consonant sounds, which are shorter and more acoustically complex, that are more likely to be incorrectly processed by the brain.

“Understanding the biological mechanisms of reading puts us in a better position to both understand how normal reading works and to ameliorate it where it goes awry,” says Kraus.

“Our results suggest that good readers profit from a stable neural representation of sound, and that children with inconsistent neural responses are likely at a disadvantage when learning to read,” Kraus adds.

“The good news is that response consistency can be improved with auditory training.”

Dyslexia: Brainscape Learn How to Learn Faster

BrainScape app

Dyslexia has always been thought of as a learning disability having to do with literacy impairment.

Many people who have it are unable to read properly when they are younger, or read a lot slower than a non-dyslexic reader.

They may also have trouble spelling or reading things like nonsense words. In short, dyslexia is a learning disability in which people have trouble translating visual language into language that the brain can understand.

It happens to be one of the most common learning disabilities among children, affect anywhere from 10% – 15% of our population, according to various sources.

Until recently it has been thought of mostly as a learning disability that specifically affects the ability to read and understand writing.

However, research recently completed by scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology adds another dimension to dyslexia that helps us understand exactly what it is.

Graduate student Tyler Perrachione, left, and Professor John Gabrieli found that people with dyslexia have a much harder time identifying voices of different speakers than non-dyslexics. 

Credit Photo: Patrick Gillooly

John Gabrieli, professor of cognitive neuroscience at GabrieliLab MIT, and his team of graduate students performed an experiment in which they took two groups of students, one with dyslexia and one without.

Firstly, they exposed them to voices of English speakers coming from cartoon characters.

Secondly, they exposed them to voices of Chinese speakers coming from cartoon characters.

After seeing the characters and hearing their voices, they were given a test, in which their task was to match the voice to the face of the person.

Overall, neither group was able to match the Chinese voice to the respective bodies with much success.

However, when it came to matching the English speaking voices to their cartoon bodies, the non-dyslexic speakers were able to match and distinguish the voices fairly well, whereas the dyslexic students had a similar success rate to matching the Chinese voices.

In other words, the dyslexic students faced difficulties matching voices to bodies no matter what the language.

This is a very significant finding because it shows that there is more to dyslexia than simply not being able to read properly.

It appears to have something to do with hearing as well, which could prove to be very helpful in diagnosing children with dyslexia much earlier on in life.

Many of the students with dyslexia who participated in the study were very high functioning students, referring to the fact that their dyslexia was not overly severe, yet they still had difficulties distinguishing the English speaking voices when matching them to the cartoon characters.

In light of this study, there could possibly be a way to test children when they are younger for dyslexia.

Currently, many students find out that they are dyslexic around the second grade, by which time they may have already suffered from a reduced level of learning.

Having found that dyslexia is also audio based, would allow educators to test students earlier, using some type of voice recognition test.

However, things are not that simple because failing a voice recognition test may not necessarily be a sign of dyslexia.

Read more at BrainScape an app that claims to help you learn faster.

Phonological Awareness: Instructional and Assessment Guidelines

This article defines phonological awareness and discusses historic and contemporary research findings regarding its relation to early reading.

Common misconceptions about phonological awareness are addressed. Research-based guidelines for teaching phonological awareness and phonemic awareness to all children are described.

Additional instructional design guidelines are offered for teaching children with learning disabilities who are experiencing difficulties with early reading.

Considerations for assessing children's phonological awareness are discussed, and descriptions of available measures are provided.

Row, row, row your boat
gently down the stream.
Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily;
Life is but a dream

Bow, bow, bow your boat
bently bown the beam.
Berrily, berrily, berrily, berrily;
Bife is but a beam.

Sow, sow, sow your soat
sently sown the seam.
Serrily, serrily, serrily, serrily;
Sife is sut a seam.

Activities like substituting different sounds for the first sound of a familiar song can help children develop phonological awareness, a cognitive substrate to reading acquisition.

Becoming phonologically aware prepares children for later reading instruction, including instruction in phonics, word analysis, and spelling (Adams, Foorman, Lundberg, & Beeler, 1998; Chard, Simmons, & Kameenui, 1998).

The most common barrier to learning early word reading skills is the inability to process language phonologically (Liberman, Shankweiler, & Liberman, 1989).

Moreover, developments in research and understanding have revealed that this weakness in phonological processing most often hinders early reading development for both students with and without disabilities (Fletcher et al., 1994).

No area of reading research has gained as much attention over the past two decades as phonological awareness.

Perhaps the most exciting finding emanating from research on phonological awareness is that critical levels of phonological awareness can be developed through carefully planned instruction, and this development has a significant influence on children's reading and spelling achievement (Ball & Blachman, 1991; Bradley & Bryant, 1985; Byrne & Fielding-Barnsley, 1989, 1991; O'Connor, Jenkins, Leicester, & Slocum, 1993).

Despite the promising findings, however, many questions remain unanswered, and many misconceptions about phonological awareness persist.

For example, researchers are looking for ways to determine how much and what type of instruction is necessary and for whom.

Moreover, many people do not understand the difference between phonological awareness, phonemic awareness, and phonics.

Still others are uncertain about the relationship between phonological awareness and early reading.

Read more of this article here: Phonological Awareness: Instructional and Assessment Guidelines | LD Topics | LD OnLine

Synesthesia: Laughter on the Canvas

Laughter is an uncontrollable emotion that brings joy. It's not, however, something you'd normally see depicted graphically in a painting.

Sonja Landis, 35, is a Carlsbad artist who brings laughter to life with the stroke of a paintbrush and some help from sound engineers.

Sonja Landis started The Painted Laugh about three years ago, when she heard her son laugh and saw colourful sound waves swirling around him.

She has a documented but not widely understood condition called Synesthesia. It's a neurological condition where two senses involuntarily cross. Her type allows her to see sound in the air.

When Landis first painted the sound waves of laughter, she did it for herself and hung a piece above her mantel.

Once people saw the painting, everyone wanted one. It eventually evolved into a business and she has been distributing them all over the country ever since, and plans on selling internationally.

After the paintings became popular, she decided to add actual sound. This way, parents and grandparents could hear their children's laughter whenever they wanted.

A button is placed behind the canvas of her paintings. Push it and it plays a recording of your child's laugh.

"There is a universal truth to laughter that doesn't need an explanation between cultures and between languages," Landis says. "And that's what I love about this the most."

Landis has partnered with Crayola, and has experimented with laughter therapy for children's hospitals.

Click here to watch a YouTube video made by The Painted laugh 

Sonja Landis also has a project running that is trying to create or develop a Painted Laugh APP for Smartphones and iPad devices.

The video below outlines her thinking on this.

Aiding the Blind: Kinecthesia - Oct 2011 - YouTube

Two Students from the University of Pennsylvania have modified a Kinect to help the vision impaired to become more aware of their environment. The project is called Kinecthesia and functions as a radar-like device, but instead of using sound, the device uses the Kinect's cameras to map out the environment and translate it into a sensation the blind can understand.

Eric Berdinis and Jeff Kiske, juniors of the University of Pennsylvania majoring in Computer Engineering, has garnered attention in the 2011 Google's Zeitergeist Young Minds Conference with their application of the gaming peripheral.

The project was born from both student's final project for Rahul Mangharam's embedded systems class. The resulting device can be likened to a high-tech walking cane.

The Kinect is a motion detecting gaming peripheral produced by Microsoft. The device is used for the Xbox 360 which can interpret specific gestures and track movement of individuals or objects.

The device is composed of an RGB camera, an infrared sensor acting as a depth sensor and multiple-array microphone. It can perform facial recognition, voice recognition and gesture recognition.

Using the Kinect's multiple cameras, Berdinis and Kiske have made a harness that produces vibrations to notify the wearer of coming obstacles.

The Kinect is connected to a BeagleBoard, a whole computer in a single board, and fitted in a waistband or belt. The device is ran in Linux and 16 AAA batteries. Since it was still in development the device is not made to run for hours. There are six vibrating motors to guide the user and weighs 1349g as of now.

There are already a number of people hacking their Kinect devices for other applications besides gaming like 3D modeling, controlling robots and using motion capture to automate devices, augment reality, and even produce a low-budget CGIs for amateur movies.


It is great that people are experimenting and applying on technologies readily available for them. Will this open doors on new innovators? Does Microsoft see a new market for their devices?

The project's development can be tracked on their own website at kinecthesia.com. The website also contains the project source code, parts list and assembly instructions.

Brain-hacking art: Getting your wires crossed

What's the colour of a trumpet blast? David Hockney, Wassily Kandinsky and other synaesthetes could tell you

LETTERS, words, numbers, sounds, touch, pain and smell all trigger flashes of colour in Carol Steen's mind. The New York-based artist first discovered she could paint her synaesthetic visions after a visit to her acupuncturist.

"Each time a needle went in a colour flashed in front of my eyes," she recalls. "When all the needles were in it was like watching a movie. I rushed home and realised I could recall enough to paint a part of what I had seen."

Other synaesthetic artists include David Hockney and Wassily Kandinsky, who painted the piece below, entitled Blue. There is still some speculation over whether Kandinsky actually had synaesthesia or was simply influenced by reports of the phenomenon in other people.

But to Christopher Tyler of the Smith-Kettlewell Brain Imaging Center in San Francisco, who has analysed Kandinsky's work, it is obvious.

"It's very explicit in his work and his writings. He went to a performance of Wagner's music and then wrote about how vivid the visual impressions of the horns were and the colour that the music evoked in his mind. That's synaesthesia," he says.

More....

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.