The scientific research advance in small steps in the work on autism, a pervasive developmental disorder that affects one in 2,500 French people. vanderbilt university, in the United States, looked at the processing of sensory information in these people. According to their work, published by the specialized journal Journal of Neurosciences, the language and communication deficits of patients are linked to a delay in the reception of auditory and visual information.
American scientists compared 32 healthy children with 32 autistic children aged 6 to 8 who did not have intellectual deficits. Both groups performed exercises involving hearing and vision. The results show a disturbance of sensory perception. “What happens with these children is a bit similar to what you perceive watching a poorly dubbed foreign film, with a lag between lip movement and sound,” says study author Mark Wallace. This discrepancy would partly explain the difficulties of communication and social interaction of children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD).
Among other things, “it has recently been shown that the connections in the brains of autistic patients are superior to those of children without ASD, but only at the local level”, indicates Le Figaro. A weak connection between distant regions of the brain could explain the sensory disturbances put forward by the Vanderbilt researchers.
