Group items tagged

When compared to children with non-ASD developmental delays, children with autism had significantly more tactile sensitivity, auditory anomalies (low response), and taste/smell sensitivity.

in this study the authors wanted to determine whether sensory abnormalities would differentiate between children with ASD and children with other developmental conditions.

When compared to the children with non-ASD developmental delays, the children with autism had significantly more tactile sensitivity, auditory anomalies (low response), and taste/smell sensitivity. The authors did not find differences between the two groups in visual or auditory over-sensitivity.

The authors found that 11% of the typically developing children and 31% of the ASD had a documented visual impairment (myopia, astigmatism, etc). This difference was statistically significant. That is, children with ASD were significantly more likely than typically developing children to have these conditions. Children with autism also displayed significantly poorer visual acuity (but within normal limits), and lower convergence. Convergence refers to the process by which the eyes move towards each other to maintain focus on approaching or close-range objects.

The findings of reduced visual acuity in children with autism when compared to typically developing children contradict previous studies that have shown enhanced visual acuity in autism. This brings us to a major limitation of this study that was correctly noted by the authors.

Limited convergence therefore would be associated with more limited depth perception. I find this intriguing because the neuropsychological profile of children with high functioning autism is often very similar to what is observed in kids with non-verbal learning disabilities (including relative weaknesses in motor-visual functioning). In addition, many parents with children with ASD report that their kids have trouble with sports and other physical activities. I thus wonder how much the reduced convergence observed in ASD may affect the motor-visual functioning in autism.

The ASD performed worse than the typically developing group across the entire grammaticality judgment task. However, the authors noted that the groups did NOT differ when the sentences were short or medium length. That is, the apparent relative weaker performance among the ASD group was mostly during long sentences. In addition, these group differences were more pronounced when the error was located at the end of long sentences. This indicates that the group differences may be due to difficulty in working memory and attention among the autism group.

However, it is unlikely that these findings are only attributable to working memory problems. Specifically, the ASD groups showed impaired performance only to some type grammatical errors but not others. That is, the ASD group had difficulty identifying omissions and substitution errors, but did not show difficulty identifying order or insertion errors. This suggests that attention and working memory difficulties interact with some unique deficits in grammaticality judgment.

What this means is that there is likely to be a complex set of many factors that contribute to ASD - not one single cause.

The same exact situation is true for other entities, like schizophrenia and attention deficit disorder (ADD).

One difference, however, is that schizophrenia and ADD likely represent changes to particular parts of the brain, while autism is likely due to changes in the global architecture of the brain.

. As posited by Henry and Kamila Markram of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, suggests that the fundamental problem in autism-spectrum disorders is not a social deficiency, but rather an hypersensitivity to experience, which includes an overwhelming fear response.

“There are those who say autistic people don’t feel enough,” says Kamila Markram. “We’re saying exactly the opposite: They feel too much.” Virtually all people with ASD report various types of oversensitivity and intense fear

“I think most people with ASD feel emotional empathy and care about the welfare of others very deeply.”