Autism Teachers

results provide indirect support for the common clinical practice of considering signs of sensory sensitivities as one factor when determining whether a child has an ASD, a developmental delay, or a language delay.

early sensory sensitivity should be one of the factors examined by pediatricians during healthy baby checkups.

results do not tell us whether the levels of sensory anomalies observed in the non-ASD group are higher than what is expected among typically developing children.

However, among the individuals with HFA, NAA was significantly associated with communication impairments, as measured by the ADI. In addition, Cre and NAA were associated with restrictive interests, and Cre alone was associated with social difficulties. The results therefore, indicate that those with the lowest concentrations of these metabolites tended to have more severe clinical symptoms as reported by the ADI.

The results of this study provide support for the need to conduct examinations that go beyond simple group comparisons.

key metabolites, while observed at normative levels, play a key role in the clinical presentation of the disorder.

presence of normative functioning in a particular domain or brain process (when compared to typical peers) does not necessarily indicate that such domain is not implicated in the phenomenology of the condition.

As a result, verbal competence may be strong in one domain (oral speech for instance), but be weak in another (reading).

because boys require two areas and a matching of visual-auditory inputs, impairment in one system may cause the whole language coordination process to fail.

The visual-auditory gap may also be why some boys may need to read word-for-word outloud or to themselves (i.e. not silently read) in order to fully comprehend or remember the story.

Some careful consideration needs to made of instructional implications for boys given some of these new discoveries. Learning by listening and learning by reading are not synonymous; route-congruent factors(listening - oral presentation, reading - written response) may need to be considered when a learning gap or frank underachievement is seen, and an insistence on the availability of auditory-visual supports (reading along with books-on-tape, detailed handouts for lecture courses) should be a requirement of every classroom.

Clinically, I was also intrigued by the high rates of vision problems found among the ASD group. Although, as I mentioned, this may be due to a self-selection of the parents who agreed to participate, this is consistent with data suggesting that children with developmental disorders are more likely to have visual problems than typically developing children

The results showed that participants with autism were slower to press on the key when the target X was presented than typically developing peers. However, the groups did not differ in accuracy of responding.

That is, both groups were equally accurate in responding to the X target, but the group with autism showed a slower patter of responses. The group with autism also showed a different pattern of brain activation when confronted with the novel distracters. Their differences were observed in both hemispheres, but were stronger in the right frontal regions. The pattern of responses observed (longer latencies and higher amplitudes) suggest greater effort when processing novel stimuli. This finding is intriguing because the brain response patterns to the other stimuli (target X and the common distracter O) were identical between the groups. These results suggest that the group with autism had difficulty processing and disengaging from novel distracting stimuli.

In neurofeedback, the person receives real-time feedback on their brain functioning and is taught how to progressively modify their responses. However, the debate regarding the effectiveness of neurofeedback is ongoing as the research is limited and highly contradictory.