Can’t wait for more submissions to this blog for people with SPD. 

(Source: fyeahsensoryseaturtle)

As he posits in this TED Talk, the brain evolved exclusively to control movement, so studying brain functions, such as executive functioning, is futile without also considering how those functions might influence and be influenced by sensory/motor processing. 

This equation is absolutely brilliant, and so beautifully illustrates one of the primary differences we see in kids with sensory processing challenges: without well-integrated, well-coordinated information from the senses, children don’t develop the same richly varied database of information about how things work, including, sometimes, their own bodies. Instead, these intelligent kids compensate by depending on their memory, rather than dynamic in-the-moment processing, which typically presents as rigidity, inflexibility, or “stereotyped” behaviors. Though I’m reluctant to make such a dehumanizing comparison, there’s an analogy to the “brain” of a supercomputer, which is able to maintain a large database of static “rules” to guide specific actions, but flounders when challenged to generalize those rules to a novel variation.

These children are not, of course, automatons, but are using their own best-available strategy to solve the problem of feeling a sense of mastery and control over their own experiences. Unfortunately, this strategy is often insufficient to the demands of moving though an inherently unpredictable and variable world. And so, in the kind of work we do, we typically aim to support the child to develop a more robust and varied database by following their interests, engineering the activity and interaction from the inside to enhance their processing and scaffold their success. 

From Science Daily: 

Linguists and psychologists have debated how much the parts of the brain that mediate direct sensory experience are involved in understanding metaphors. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, in their landmark work ‘Metaphors we live by’, pointed out that our daily language is full of metaphors, some of which are so familiar (like “rough day”) that they may not seem especially novel or striking. They argued that metaphor comprehension is grounded in our sensory and motor experiences.

New brain imaging research reveals that a region of the brain important for sensing texture through touch, the parietal operculum, is also activated when someone listens to a sentence with a textural metaphor. The same region is not activated when a similar sentence expressing the meaning of the metaphor is heard.

Embodied cognition strikes again! I find this interesting, as it is commonly believed that individuals with autism and Asperger’s have difficulty processing metaphors. Could we trace this, too, back to a lack of effective connectivity between the senses? For those individuals who lack a rich and nuanced sensory database for the visual, auditory, and tactile senses associated with a label, such as “rough,” is it any wonder that the word might lack in rich and nuanced meaning?

Read the full article here.  

Edited to clarify, with apologies: it is certainly not my intention to over-generalize. In my experience, there are as many variations of autism as there are individuals who have the diagnosis. There, are, however, some patterns of differences that cause significant functional challenges, confusion, and frustration for the children I work with. This research sparked my interest and caused me to speculate about receptive processing of language and a possible connection to sensory integration because it would suggest an alternative to the typical rote method of teaching.

From Science Daily:

Anxious people have long been classified as “hypersensitive” — they’re thought to be more fearful and feel threatened more easily than their counterparts. But new research from Tel Aviv University shows that the anxious may not be hypersensitive at all — in fact, they may not be sensitive enough.

As part of a study on how the brain processes fear in anxious and non-anxious individuals, Tahl Frenkel, a Ph.D. candidate in TAU’s School of Psychological Sciences and the Adler Center for Research in Child Developmental and Psychopathology, working with her supervisor Prof. Yair Bar-Haim, measured brain activity as study participants were shown images designed to induce fear and anxiety. Using an EEG to measure electrical activity caused by the neuronal activity that represents deep processing of these stimuli, the researchers discovered that the anxious group was actually less stimulated by the images than the non-anxious group.

Surprisingly, anxious study participants weren’t shown to be as physiologically sensitive to subtle changes in their environment as less fearful individuals, Frenkel explains. She theorizes that anxious people could have a deficit in their threat evaluation capabilities — necessary for effective decision-making and fear regulation — leading to an under-reaction to subtle threatening stimuli. Non-anxious individuals seem to have a subconscious “early warning system,” allowing them to prepare for evolving threats. Essentially, anxious people are “surprised” by fearful stimuli that non-anxious individuals have already subconsciously noticed, analyzed, and evaluated.

This supports our frequent observation of anxiety in children with poorly integrated sensory processing, who tend to selectively attend to one mode of sensation (typically vision) to the exclusion of the conflicting or incongruous input. They lack the kind of flexible shifting of attention that would allow them to alert and orient to the subtle environmental cues that would otherwise help them anticipate changes, transitions, and other events with enough time to generate a purposeful response. Instead, they tend to react with a fight/flight response and often make attempts to avoid this kind of ambiguity by adhering to predictable routines and controlling the actions of others with their own emotions and behavior. 

When confronted with a potential threat, Frenkel concluded, non-anxious people unconsciously notice subtle changes in the environment before they consciously recognize the threat. Lacking such preparation, anxious individuals often react more strongly, as the threat takes them more “by surprise.”

“The EEG results tell us that what looks like hypersensitivity on a behavioral level is in fact the anxious person’s attempt to compensate for a deficit in the sensitivity of their perception,” she explains.

Read the article here. 

From Discover Magazine’s Mind & Brain blogs, Carl Zimmer summarizes research that highlights how the brain uses multi-sensory processing to construct perception. 

The whole article is worth reading, but I was especially drawn to the opening paragraph, in which the author describes the mundane incident that inspired him to write about it. He uses the anecdote to elucidate how our auditory and visual senses are co-dependent, but by coincidence, it’s the same analogy I often employ to help parents understand how poorly integrated sensory processing impacts on their child’s ability to stay emotionally regulated and to make sense of the world around them:

“I don’t usually stream Netflix onto my television to probe the 
inner workings of my mind, but it had that effect not long ago. 
While I was catching an old episode ofLaw & Order: Criminal Intent, the actors’ voices lagged a fraction of a second behind the movement 
of their mouths, making me so disoriented it completely ruined the show. Soon my irritation turned to puzzlement, and some self-observation allowed me to track my frustration to a precise source. I didn’t care that the ominous soundtrack rose half a second late when Vincent D’Onofrio and Kathryn Erbe crept into the subway tunnel where they 
were about to find a body. I didn’t care that the show’s trademark duh-dung! sound marking a new scene was still duh-dung-ing after the scene started. It was only when people talked that I went batty. I would watch the characters speak, and then I’d switch to listening to them, and then I’d watch them speak again. I just couldn’t meld the two streams of information in my head.”

I use this example because the response is so universal… the mere suggestion usually inspires reflexive cringing and groaning. I suspect that the emotional response we experience is akin to motion sickness- hypothesized to be a protective “sit down and reassess” mechanism to resolve the potentially dangerous mismatch between your vision and your vestibular system. It’s as if our brains are telling us, “something’s not right.” 

“We don’t mix up our senses willy-nilly, however. There is a window of less than a tenth of a second in which a stimulus from one sense can affect the others. As my misadventure with Netflix showed, my brain was accustomed to balancing sight and sound to make sense of what people were saying without my even noticing, but the sound lag during that episode of Law and Order was so wide that the two sensory streams created confusion instead.”

The important distinction, however, is that we, with relatively intact processing systems, have the history, the memory of a prior experience in which (in this case) Law and Order proceeds in its usual, well-sychronized way. Comparing his present experience to a memory of a previous, similar event, the author’s emotional response of disorientation and confusion was able to give way to the more intellectual response of “irritation” and “puzzlement.” By contrast, children with poorly integrated auditory/visual processing lack a strong database of prior experience typically selectively attend to the stronger or more salient sense, missing the supplemental input that would allow them to perceive the full spectrum of the event. This has significant implications for their ability to attend to events in the environment, including social interactions and opportunities for incidental learning. 

The article goes on to describe several illusions which illustrate how the individual modalities conspire to create a new, unified perception, the most famous of which is the McGurk Effect, in which observing sound being articulated influences the processing of the auditory information (i.e. if you see “ga” and hear “ba”, you percieve “da”). Given the high degree of influence, is it any wonder that these children tend to acquire language less efficiently?

The second aspect of multi-sensory processing explored here is how our proproceptive and tactile body scheme senses are influenced by the other senses:

“Sight and sound are not the only senses we mingle in our brains. What we touch can affect what we see or hear. Our very understanding of the shape of our own body can be informed not just directly, through our eyes, but also by the pressure of our feet on the ground, the stretch of ligaments in our shoulders, and the wiggle of balance-sensing nerve hairs in our inner ears. Together, our senses let us control our bodies, keeping us from falling over every time we stand up.

“But this much integration comes with an astonishing ability to be duped. In 1998 Matthew Botvinick and Jonathan Cohen, two psychologists then at the University of Pittsburgh, found they could make people feel as if a rubber hand were really their own. All they had to do was put a rubber hand in front of their subjects and have them put their real hand behind a screen. The scientists simultaneously began to stroke the real hand and the fake one with paintbrushes. In a matter of seconds, people reported that the rubber hand felt as if it were part of their own body and that they even felt it being stroked.”

Again, these illusions wonderfully bring to light the normally invisible process of integration, but what about out-of-synch sensory systems? The analogy I often invoke to help parents understand body awareness is driving, or more specifically, parking. Having recently retired the 1997 Buick I inherited from my grandmother for a much more compact and responsive car, this phenomenon was fresh in my mind… My mind had created a mental “map” of the dimensions of the car that allowed me to navigate through space and had been calibrated to calculate the relative responsiveness of the steering wheel, brakes, suspension, etc. to do this accurately. Though the new car is unquestionably easier to park and drive, it took weeks to adjust my driving to match the new car’s body map. It took weeks for this process to turn from a conscious, effortful process to an automatic one. For a child with poor body awareness and postural control, I suspect that moving about in the environment is akin to attempting to parallel park an 18-wheeler when you’re accustomed to driving a subcompact. Physically, it’s difficult to master the mechanical maneuverings required to feel successful, and emotionally, well… stressful seems a woefully inadequate descriptor. Add to this challenge a visual perceptual processing deficit, and suddenly, it’s as if you’re attempting to do this with fogged mirrors and windows… 

“The tricks we use to integrate our senses take time to develop. As children grow up, they get better and better at combining sights and sounds. When scientists compare children of the same age, they discover a fascinating pattern: The ones who are better at combining sights and sounds tend to score higher on intelligence tests. It’s possible, some scientists suggest, that helping children combine their senses through training exercises will enable them to do better in school. ”

And so, this is what we do; we help to calibrate our interactions with the child to help them attend with greater consistency and efficiency and provide the multi-modal input that helps their processing system mature.

Read the full article, with links to great videos, here. 

This TED Talk by Daniel Wolpert is a delightfully succinct breakdown of sensory processing and praxis for the purpose of guiding motor actions. Absolutely brilliant! 

From Science Daily:

As children move toward adolescence, they rely increasingly on close relationships with peers. Socially withdrawn children, who have less contact with peers, may miss out on the support that friendships provide. In a new study about the peer relationships of almost 2,500 fifth graders who are socially withdrawn in different ways and those who aren’t withdrawn, researchers have found that withdrawn children who can be described as “anxious-solitary” differ considerably in their relationships with peers, compared to other withdrawn children and children who aren’t withdrawn.

(…)

Socially withdrawn children who are classified as anxious-solitary are believed to experience competing motivations — they want to interact with peers, but the prospect of doing so causes anxiety that interferes with such interactions. In contrast, unsociable children are seen as having what’s called low approach and low avoidance motives — that is, they have little desire to interact with peers but aren’t repelled by the prospect of doing so; for these children, the overtures of peers don’t make them feel anxious.

Unfortunately, this pattern is all too familiar. Kids who have trouble integrating sights, sound, motion, and movement also have trouble making sense of the actions of others, decoding their intentions, and reading their responses. Fortunately, we also know how to support them: by helping them to attune to and give meaning to the actions and ideas of others, we can scaffold successful experiences, change their perception of the interaction, and ultimately, bolster their confidence! 

Read the full article here. 

From SFARI News and Opinion In Brief, Cognition and Behavior: 

Children with autism have more trouble switching their focus between sounds and pictures than do typically developing controls or children with intellectual disability, according to a study published 1 July in theJournal of Autism and Developmental Disorders¹. 

Similarly, adults with autism are less likely to be distracted by a face than are typically developing controls, according to another study published 24 June in Autism².

Studies have shown that individuals with autism have difficulty switching their focus between different objects or faces. But it is unclear whether this is a cause or a consequence of the social deficits seen in people with autism.

In the first study, 18 children with autism, 18 intelligence-quotient-matched controls and 18 children with learning disabilities matched by both age and intelligence quotient took three attention tests.

In one, the children had to match the shape pictured on the back of a piece of paper with one of four shapes pictured on the front. In the second, they had to match images with written words. In the third, they looked at a picture showing four different items, such as various animals, and had to match one of those images to a spoken word.

The researchers scored the answers for accuracy and considered a delay of more than six seconds to be a wrong answer.

The children with autism were less accurate than both control groups in all three tasks, the study found. Unlike the controls, they also struggled more with the spoken-word task than with either of the two visual tasks.

The results show that children with autism have trouble switching attention between two modes of stimuli, in this case sight and sound. This could underlie deficits in language, which requires the integration of both types of information, the researchers suggest.

Read the whole article here. 

From Science Daily:

Researchers directed by Dr. Laurent Mottron at the University of Montreal’s Centre for Excellence in Pervasive Development Disorders (CETEDUM) have determined that people with autism concentrate more brain resources in the areas associated with visual detection and identification, and conversely, have less activity in the areas used to plan and control thoughts and actions. This might explain their outstanding capacities in visual tasks.

The researchers used data gathered from 26 different neuroimaging studies from around the world to conduct a meta-analysis of brain activation patterns. 

“Through this meta-analysis, we were able to observe that autistics exhibit more activity in the temporal and occipital regions and less activity in frontal cortex than non-autistics. The identified temporal and occipital regions are typically involved in perceiving and recognizing patterns and objects. The reported frontal areas subserve higher cognitive functions such as decision making, cognitive control, planning and execution,” explained first author Fabienne Samson, who is also affiliated with the CETEDUM.

They note that these findings are consistent with the observation that people with autism often have exceptional capacities in visual spatial processing and visual memory. 

The current findings suggest a general functional reorganization of the brain in favor of perception processes — the processes by which information is recorded the brain. This allows autistic individuals to successfully perform, albeit in their own way, higher-level cognitive tasks that would usually require a strong involvement of frontal areas in typical individuals. These are tasks that require reasoning — for example, a research participant would be asked if a statement is true or false, or to categorize a range of objects into groups.

(…)

“The stronger engagement of the visual system, whatever the task, represents the first physiological confirmation that enhanced perceptual processing is a core feature of neural organization in this population. We now have a very strong statement about autism functioning which may be ground for cognitive accounts of autistic perception, learning, memory and reasoning.” This finding shows that the autistic brain successfully adapt by reallocating brain areas to visual perception, and offers many new lines of enquiry with regards to developmental brain plasticity and visual expertise in autistics.

Read the Science Daily article here.

The following recap of the same findings from the BBC, is a bit more sensational in its reporting.  

 People with autism use their brains differently from other people, which may explain why some have extraordinary abilities to remember and draw objects in detail, according to new research.

University of Montreal scientists say in autistic people, the brain areas that deal with visual information are highly developed. Other brain areas are less active.

(…)

(This research) suggests that the brains of autistic people are organised differently from those of other people; the area at the back of the brain, which processes visual information, is more highly developed. That leaves less brain capacity in areas which deal with decision-making and planning.

That may be why people with autism can be better than others at carrying out some types of visual tasks. For example, some are able to draw highly accurate and detailed images from memory. However, they can find it difficult to interpret things like facial expressions.

The condition varies in severity, with some people functioning well, but others completely unable to take part in normal society. The researchers believe their findings may lead towards new ways of helping people to live with the condition.

“The natural tendency is to think that autism is a form of disorganisation. Here, what we see is that it is a reorganisation of the brain,” he said.

Read it here. 

I’m offering both summaries because the differences reflect my concern, not with the findings of this particular study, but with the nature of reporting on autism research in general. There’s a strong media bias towards reporting the “exceptional” and “foreign” in individuals with autism, often sacrificing the most meaningful and salient results. 

Enhanced visual spatial skills may emerge as a side effect in individuals who are biased towards visual information. However, I think it’s important to assert that causality cannot be determined from mere correlation. Certainly, the data is very intriguing, but it seems important to put the data in the context of the lifespan. Without access to the specifics of the 357 individuals with autism and 370 typical controls ultimately included in this meta-analysis, it’s difficult to determine the age range of the participants, but I’m assuming, given the nature of the tasks, that most are adults. This is an important distinction because these imaging studies represent a snapshot in time, specific to the task and specific to the individual’s unique development.

The researchers distinctly note that these findings:

“offer(s) many new lines of enquiry with regards to developmental brain plasticity.” 

However, to varying degrees, the editorial content of each of these articles infer that these observed differences in brain organization represent the origin of the differences in processing in individuals with autism. It seems just as likely that these differences emerge over time, reflecting the individual’s dominant mode of processing, poorly integrated multi-sensory processing, and an over-dependence on memory over novel motor planning and praxis in everyday decision making. This is what the researchers seem to imply.

Following that line of reasoning, it may be possible to modify the effect with support to integrate the visual system with other modes of sensation, allowing increased activation of central processing and executive function.