A new study was published this month in the Journal of Neuroscience that suggests that people with autism have difficulty processing sight and sound simultaneously. The phenomenon was described as watching a movie that has the sound off-sync with the video portion. Dr. Mark Wallace at the Vanderbilt Brain Institute led this research, which has strong implications for sensory integration and what it means for language and communication in people with autism.
The study took 64 children (ages 6 to 18; half with autism, half without) and showed them various video clips, including a hammer hitting a nail, flashes with beeps, and people speaking. The task was to press a button if the sound was synched up appropriately with the visual imagery. Results found that the children with autism had more difficulty processing simultaneous input from auditory and visual channels. In other words, they were more likely to fail at this task.
Dr. Wallace said, “One of the classic pictures of children with autism is they have their hands over their ears. 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.” Fascinating! Quentin holds his ears occasionally (most notably when the “Happy Birthday” song is sung to him annually), so it suddenly makes it clear to me that he’s having difficulty processing auditory (the song) and visual channels (the cake with candles, the people singing) at the same time.
This is the video that Vanderbilt presented to describe the research, so take a look for yourself. (If you do not see it below, click here to view it on YouTube.)
I’m impressed with this study, because it uncovers something that has not been uncovered before. For those of us who are parents of children with autism spectrum disorders, the issues with sensory integration are already quite obvious; therefore I’m more than thrilled to see that academics are finally getting to the heart of it.
However, there still seems to be something missing. For example, this does not explain why Quentin does not respond to me when I call him by his name – either when he is looking at me or not. And the “badly dubbed foreign film” metaphor that is used to describe what an autistic brain is experiencing doesn’t sit well with me either. I know that there are times when Quentin understands visual and verbal cues together so well. I am pretty sure that the publicists are using this metaphor because the task in the study was to sync up the sound and visual cues of movies – but this does not necessarily mean that this is how their brains work. I believe that this is a very lazy description of something that has more nuance than a broken projector.
Nonetheless, I’m thrilled that this research was conducted. It is a great start to understanding how the autistic brain works. More importantly, it is some of the first real proof that sensory integration disorder is a real phenomenon in the brain, and that children with autism benefit from therapy that works on this deficit.