According to an article in today's Science Daily, researchers at Yale University have discovered another clue to why children with autism develop differently from their typical peers.
Individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) tend to stare at people's mouths rather than their eyes. Now, an NIH-funded study in 2-year-olds with the social deficit disorder suggests why they might find mouths so attractive: lip-sync—the exact match of lip motion and speech sound.In theory, this finding could lead to educational techniques that could help very young children with autism build their social referencing skills. This could be hugely important for children with autism, since their challenges with "reading" social cues create so many problems as they enter school, interact with peers, and begin to navigate social relationships.Such audiovisual synchrony preoccupied toddlers who have autism, while their unaffected peers focused on socially meaningful movements of the human body, such as gestures and facial expressions.
"Typically developing children pay special attention to human movement from very early in life, within days of being born. But in children with autism, even as old as two years, we saw no evidence of this," explained Ami Klin, Ph.D., of the Yale Child Study Center, who led the research. "Toddlers with autism are missing rich social information imparted by these cues, and this is likely to adversely affect the course of their development."
The study is consistent with something I have suspected for a long time; that children with autistic brain wiring do not consider humans to be humans; they consider them to be objects that walk around and make noise and provide food. They observe the source of the noise, be it a machine or a human, with the same objectivity. Buried in the details of that study was the fact that their interest was grabbed by very non-human-like dots, just because it was the source of the noise.
Wow I hope you dont work with Autistic children because your ignorance is astounding
I am not sure about children with autism not acknowledging other people as people. In my experience with my daughters who have autism they are very aware that other people are around yet they seem to choose to ignore most people. However if they are familiar with the people then they can become very engaging.
I guess this is another example of how different children on the spectrum can be.
I got out of this study, and other’s like it, that kids with autism happen to focus on other area’s of people and as a result interpreting body language is often either not there or not at all. I’m not sure that it portrays that kids with autism do not consider humans not to be human and I do not see that with my own child. If anything, my child has a hard time understanding that he’s not on the same social level as me, being he is the child and I am the parent. My child does know I’m more than just his feeding mechanism and a noise-maker. My child knows the noises we humans make, have meaning but figuring out that meaning can be difficult.
Since body language is a large part of social interpretation, early detection and interventions can be a great help. People do need to rely on more than spoken words and often body language is a language all to its own. Not only can kids with autism start having trouble in school and relationships, but in community as well. Some one could be saying all nice pleasant words but have a gun in their hand.
Brain scans show that people with autism have brains that don’t connect to the super-fast people-recognising bit of the brain. That bit is used for hobbies and specialist interests instead. So recognising people and their body language has to be done much more slowly, using brain-wiring that was never really designed for it. But we can recall information and fine detail about hobbies or our work with amazing speed and accuracy. Eye contact is ‘painful’ because it connects directly into the bit of the brain that recognises anger in other people. People’s eyes are very scary to look at, for us, so we’ll try to avoid it. It doesn’t mean we don’t see people are people – we just find it much more difficult to find the right info on them in our brains, or work out the right responses fast enough.
Please be careful about making assumptions that what is wrong is not a vision problem. Everyone told us that the reason our daughter couldn’t figure out where something was that you pointed to was because she was “autistic” . Last year we saw a specialist optometrist and she has divergence excess which means her left and right eye don’t focus at the same point at a distance. So before anyone assumes that it is autism, you should find out if there might be another reason. The school would never believe me when I told them she had a vision problem because they always have one eye checked and then the other, but not both together!
I suspect the same thing can be true of auditory problems- we don’t know what they are hearing and they don’t know if it should be different from what they hear, never having heard any differently their whole life.