Children with autism prefer play with sensory aspects

A study shows that autistic children prefer sensory play, such as pushing a windmill and watching it spin, to other types of play.

Play is critical to children's development, including children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). Kathy Ralabate Doody, assistant professor of exceptional education at SUNY Buffalo State, observed different play options to determine those most likely to appeal to children with ASD.The findings were published in the North American Journal of Medicine and Science.

"Children with ASD chose to engage in play that provided strong sensory feedback, cause-and-effect results, and repetitive motions," said Doody.

One novel aspect of the research, conducted by Doody with Jana Mertz, program coordinator at the Autism Spectrum Disorder Center at the Women & Children's Hospital of Buffalo, was that the children with ASD could freely select their preferred activities. The research was conducted at a monthly event, "Au-some Evening," at Explore & More, a children's museum with exhibits that are designed to engage children through play. The event is open to children with ASD, their families, and their guests.

The most popular activity among children with ASD was the exhibit "Climbing Stairs." Children who climbed a short staircase could then drop a ball and watch it descend. Another popular activity involved a windmill. Children can push its arms, causing it to spin. A table filled with rice completed the top three exhibits among children with ASD.

In addition to the well-known senses of sight, smell, touch, taste, and hearing, Doody described others, including the vestibular and proprioceptive senses. The vestibular sense helps us keep our balance and know where we are in space; proprioception has to do with the way our joints respond to movement and pressure. "It's the sense that makes deep-tissue massage pleasurable," she said. Children with ADS preferred activities that involved the vestibular and proprioceptive senses as well as other senses.

"Children with ADS sometimes tend to crave motion, and if they can't be moving, they like to look at moving objects," said Doody, noting that motion engages the vestibular, proprioceptive, and visual senses. "So just watching the windmill engaged them. When the windmill turned in response to their push, it also provided cause-and-effect play. And the repetition of the spinning movement provided a third level of satisfaction." Climbing the stairs also satisfied multiple senses. Playing with rice provided both tactile and visual stimulation as children felt and watched the rice pour through their fingers.

By knowing the kind of play that children with ASD prefer, educators and clinicians can use such play as positive reinforcement in educational and treatment settings. "This information is especially helpful for children with ASD who have difficulty communicating their preferences," said Doody.

Parents can also benefit from the information. "A child who is playing alone is developing a degree of independence," said Doody, "and that can enable the parent or caregiver to engage in other activities, like making dinner or attending to another child. Parents might use a snow globe so the child can observe movement. Aquariums or water sculptures provide movement, too."

Some of the behaviors exhibited by people with autism -- hand-flapping, for example -- may reflect a need for sensory stimulation. "Sometimes just giving a child a string of Mardi Gras beads to swing and watch will help the child sit still," said Doody. Toys that provide sensory stimulation -- sounds, movement, or lights -- in response to an act such as pushing a button also may be well-received. However, Doody noted, the need for, and tolerance of, sensory stimulation varies by individual.

At Explore & More, children with ADS tended to avoid the exhibits that required pretending, such as imagining oneself as a butterfly or as a cook in a play kitchen. Doody explained that pretending requires a phenomenon called Theory of Mind, which is the ability to imagine oneself in the place of another. "That develops much earlier in children with typical development than in children with autism, if they develop it at all," said Doody.

Doody hopes that options for children with ASD will be built into a variety of recreational facilities, after-school programs, and playgrounds. The benefit is not only inclusion. "It also encourages social interaction between children with ASD and their peers," said Doody. "Some children with ASD are academically successful, but they struggle in social situations. So opportunities to play with their peers are really valuable."

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Study: Children with autism better at spotting motion

A study shows that children with autism are better at spotting movement than children without autism. This could explain some of the symptoms of autism.

Children with autism see simple movement twice as quickly as other children their age, a new study shows.

Researchers say this hypersensitivity to motion may provide clues to a fundamental cause of the developmental disorder.

Such heightened sensory perception in autism may help explain why some people with the disorder are painfully sensitive to noise and bright lights. It also may be linked to some of the complex social and behavioral deficits associated with autism.

“We think of autism as a social disorder because children with this condition often struggle with social interactions, but what we sometimes neglect is that almost everything we know about the world comes from our senses,” says Duje Tadin, assistant professor of brain and cognitive sciences at the University of Rochester. “Abnormalities in how a person sees or hears can have a profound effect on social communication.”

Although previous studies have found that people with autism possess enhanced visual abilities with static images, this is the first research to discover a heightened perception of motion.

For the study published in the Journal of Neuroscience, 20 children with autism and 26 typically developing children, ages 8 to 17, looked at brief video clips of moving black and white bars and simply indicated which direction the bars were heading, right or left.

Each time a participant made the correct direction choice, the next video clip became slightly shorter and thus a little more difficult. When they made a mistake, the next video became a bit longer and thus easier to see. In this way, the researchers were able to measure how quickly children with autism can perceive motion.

When the bars in the image were just barely visible, both groups of children performed identically. When the contrast or darkness of the bars was increased all participants in the study got better at perceiving the direction of movement.

“But kids with autism, got much, much better—performing twice as well as their peers,” says co-lead author Jennifer Foss-Feig, a postdoctoral fellow at the Child Study Center at Yale University. In fact, the worst performing participant with autism was roughly equal to the average of the participants without autism.

Sensory overload

“This dramatically enhanced ability to perceive motion is a hint that the brains of individuals with autism keep responding more and more as intensity increases. Although this could be considered advantageous, in most circumstances if the neural response doesn’t stop at the right level it could lead to sensory overload,” explains Foss-Feig.

Such hypersensitive perception is the neural signature for a brain that is unable to dampen its response to sensory information. This same increase in neural “excitability” is also found in epilepsy, which is strongly linked to autism. In fact, as many as one third of individuals with autism also have epilepsy. Normally, the brain puts the brakes on its responses to sound, taste, touch, and other stimuli when they become too intense.

What’s important about this dampening ability is that it’s a ubiquitous mechanism controlling how humans perceive the world, researchers say.

“If the processing of our vision, hearing, and other sensory systems is abnormal in some way, it will have a cascading effect on other brain functions,” says Carissa Cascio, assistant professor of psychiatry at Vanderbilt University, in whose lab the study was conducted.

“You may be able to see better, but at some point the brain really is over responding. A strong response to high intensity stimuli in autism could be one reason for withdrawal.”

The research builds on earlier findings that people with autism process visual stimuli differently. For example, previous studies have shown that individuals with autism are better able to perceive basic patterns, are able to see simple line images more quickly, and are more focused on details than individuals without the condition.

By contrast, in more complex tasks, like facial recognition, these enhancements become impairments. Likewise, autism is associated with deficits in perceiving motion patterns more complex than the simple moving bars used in this study, such as detecting walking and other biological movements.

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