Sensory Impairments

Sensory Impairments

Many individuals with autism seem to have an impairment in one or more of their senses. This impairment can involve the all of the senses: auditory, visual, tactile (touch), taste, vestibular (hearing), olfactory (smell). These senses may be hypersensitive or hyposensitive, resulting in the person experiencing interference such as in the case of tinnitus (a persistent ringing or buzzing in the ears). As a result, it may be difficult for individuals with autism to process incoming sensory information properly.

Sensory Impairments

May have fear of sounds

May be unresponsive to sounds

May stare at lights

May be sensitive to light (Especially fluorescent fight)

May be insensitive to pain

May dislike contact with textures and people

May lick and/or smell things

Sensory impairments may also make it difficult for the individual to withstand normal stimulation. For example, some individuals with autism are tactilely defensive and avoid all forms of body contact. Others, in contrast, have little or no tactile or pain sensitivity. Furthermore, some people with autism seem to crave deep pressure. Another example of sensory abnormalities is hypersensitive hearing. About 40% of individuals with autism experience discomfort when exposed to certain sounds or frequencies. These individuals often cover their ears and have a tantrum after hearing sounds such as a baby's cry or the sound of a motor. In contrast, some parents have suspected that their child with autism is deaf because she or he appeared unresponsive to sounds.

(Gillingham (1997) believes that sound understanding of the sensory processing of persons with autism depends upon a better knowledge base about the condition. For a long time, the scientific community thought that nature always limits the amount of stimuli coming in and prevents the brain from becoming overloaded with information. Thinking on this matter has recently changed. We now recognize that some persons are supersensitive. Persons with autism link their disability directly to the senses. Their eyes, ears, noses, and skin may seem normal, but sensory messages reaching their brains are not linked to an understandable picture of the outside world. Persons with autism describe how the touch of another human being can be excruciating, smells can be overpowering, hearing can hurt, sight can be distorted, and tastes can be too strong. In other words, their world can be a world of pain. The development of the autistic personality, according to Gillingham, stems from the process of coping with pain.

The receiving of faulty messages about the world around them causes persons with autism to ignore or misinterpret speech and gesture, which adversely affects their ability to communicate. Because of these missing links in understanding, persons with autism appear to be withdrawn and seem to live in an isolated world of their own. Moreover, the frustration caused by the inability to communicate often leads to disturbed behavior.

Many individuals with autism also have a narrow or focused attention span that has been termed stimulus over-selectivity. Basically, their attention is focused on only one, often irrelevant aspect of an object. For example, they may focus on the color of a utensil and ignore other aspects such as the shape. In this case, it may be difficult for a person with autism to discriminate between a fork and a spoon if he or she attends only to the color. Since attention is the first stage in processing information, failure to attend to the relevant aspects of an object or person may limit one's ability to learn about objects and people in one's environment.

Stimulus over-selectivity is an important working concept for criminal justice professionals and others who are trying to initiate a conversation with a person with autism. For most people, it takes a short period of time, less than a second or two, to redirect attention from one stimulus to another in the environment. In contrast, individuals with autism continue to attend to a stimulus even when prompted for redirection, and they may take three to five seconds or longer to shift their attention. Many persons with autism have difficulty directing their attention to changes in their surroundings. By the time they do shift their attention, they lose information regarding context and content. An inability to shift attention in a timely manner may result in their not hearing the first sentence or two that someone else might say. For example, if a person with autism is focusing on an object of any kind and a police officer asks her or him a question, it may take a few seconds before she or he can redirect attention and listen to the officer. As a result, the person has difficulty understanding the officer because she or he did not attend to the first few sentences. This is why an interviewing officer may need to repeat the first two sentences of the conversation when speaking with a person with autism.