What is Autism?

Introduction

Autism is a mental disorder wherein a person having this particular disorder displays a delay in social interaction, language and symbolic play. Individuals with autism have great difference in terms of skills, behaviors and sensory system from normal people. Stimulations like sounds, vision and touch have a huge effect on a person with autism. (Wikipedia, 2006) Moreover, a person with autism have no difference in the physical aspect with normal persons, however studies have found out that an enlarged brain size are associated with autism although the impacts are still unknown. (Harda, Minshew, Mallikarjhun and Keshavan, 2001)

The social development of individuals with autism begins in the early life. Infants or children having this particular disorder find it harder to interact and engage in normal activities. Usually autistic infants do not interact with others, them also seldom cries and they lack eye contact. Children having this disorder manifests passiveness, enjoys being alone and resist attention. (Wikipedia, 2006)

In addition children having autism lacks the ability and capacity to view things from the outlook of another individual. (Baron-Cohen, Leslie and Frith, 1985) The characteristics of autism includes oversensitivity and underreactivity to different sensory modalities such as touch, movement, sights, sounds and delays in speech, language and motor skills which usually leads to difficulty to cope up with the academics. Individuals exhibiting autism usually finds it hard to deal with the academics because of the difficulty to understand simple instructions and interaction with other people. (Wikipedia, 2006)

This paper examines the relationship of the autism behavior on the biology and physiology of sensory modalities.

Over the past years, the theory of mind has been the basis for understanding the important features of autism. A number of studies have given focus on the importance of the theory of mind hypothesis especially in explanation of the central inadequacy in the social and language skills of individuals with autism. On the other hand, not all symptoms of autism can be interpreted using this particular framework such as deficits in executive functions and repetitive behaviors. Autism is a complicated disorder that surrounds different areas of impairment which cannot be interpreted under the theory of mind hypothesis. (Flusberg, 1999)

Autism begins at the tender age of infants, and on earlier studies, it has shown that the size of the brain has a great association with autism. According to Powell (2004) recent studies that give emphasis on the brains of autistic children that are developing have shown interesting results, in which there are differences from the normal developing brain. Moreover, a number of studies have shown that autistic children between the ages of two to four have bigger brain volumes than normal children of those age range, however when the children reached the age six or seven the difference on the volume of the brain have disappeared and because of that findings Eric Courchesne and his colleagues formed the hypothesis that the overgrowth on the brains of the children must have occurred prior to the appearance of the characteristics of autism. In another study of Courchesne, it has shown that at birth the size of the head of autistic children are smaller compare to normal children, however when they reach 6-14 months, the size of their head increased to the 84th percentile, the increase in the size of the head is associated with the increase in the volume of the gray and white matter regions of the brain. The study suggested that individuals with autism the uncontrolled growth of the brain takes place on the first year of life, and the late development of speech, repetitive behaviors and severe autistic symptoms are also associated with the increased brain size.

One of the severe symptoms of autism is the impairment of an individual’s sensory functions and one of those is the vision. According to Gense and Gense (2002), the following characteristics are manifested to children that have an autism spectrum disorder and also visual impairments:

Impairments in Communication

The language is developed very slowly and in
severe cases it does not develop at all.

There is a great difficulty breaking the
pattern of involuntary repetition of words which often leads to patterns of
verbal preservation with outlandish meanings.

Non-conventional behaviors such as gestures
are used as form of communication.

The child may be overly active or passive

Impairments in Social Interactions

The child does not familiarize toward sounds.

His or her social interests’ id restricted.

Play repetitively

Too reserved behavior of the child and
redirection of activities can be a problem.

The child prefers to be alone than to interact
with others.

Lack the ability of understanding another
person’s emotions.

Individuals with autism have impairments with regards to attention to people and socially relevant stimulus, and due to the fact that the important stimulus in social interaction is physically complicated it is suggested that the inadequacy in the sensory processing of complicated stimuli aids in the abnormal attention and language of autistic individuals. In the study, children with autism that exhibits high-functioning verbal ability has shown irrelevant abnormalities in the sensory processing of the spectral characteristics of a simple sound, complex sound or a vowel, however, their reluctant familiarization was discriminately impaired to the changes in the vowel but not in the changes on simple and complex sounds, which means that the damage on the auditory processing of vowels takes place further than the stage of sensory processing, and that the deficiency in familiarizing the changes in vowels might be possible on the quality of speechness in the sound stimuli. And if such deficit occurs during infancy, it deeply jeopardizes the development of the verbal and nonverbal communication skills of children with autism. (Ceponiene, Lepisto, Vanhala, Alku, Naatanen and Yaguchi, 2003)

Although these individuals may have a hard time in communicating with other individuals verbally or non-verbally, because of the difficulty in orientation with some of the words that usually leads to lower language ability. However, lower language ability does not mean these individuals cannot perform specific functions. In the study conducted by Joseph, McGrath and Flusberg (2005) the researchers evaluated the relationship of executive dysfunction to the language ability in children with autism. The study have revealed that children with autism are less developed compared to normal children in terms of their language skills however, there is no association between language ability and the executive performance which includes the working memory, working memory and inhibitory control and planning. On the other hand, normal children used in the sample have revealed that language ability and executive performance is correlated. The authors have suggested that the executive dysfunction in autism does not have a direct relationship with the impairment in language but rather the failure to use language for self-regulation.

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