The scientific research advance 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 specialist journal Journal of Neurosciencesthe language and communication deficits of the patients would be linked to a shift in the reception of auditory and visual information.
The American scientists compared 32 healthy children with 32 autistic children aged 6 to 8 who did not have intellectual deficits. The two groups carried out exercises mobilizing hearing and vision. The results show a disturbance of sensory perception. “What happens in these children is somewhat similar to what you perceive when 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 brain of autistic patients would be superior to those of children without ASD, but only at the local level”, indicates Le Figaro. A weak connection between the remote regions of the brain could explain the sensory disturbances highlighted by the Vanderbilt researchers.
