Category: auditory

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Research for Practice: Sensory Integration and Dyslexia.

Ayres’ published her research findings, making a case for emerging patterns of sensory integration dysfunction including;   

  • developmental dyspraxia – this pattern linking motor planning difficulties with deficits in tactile perception
  • difficulties with integration of both sides of the body; poor right-left discrimination, difficulties crossing the midline, and  reduced bilateral motor coordination – impacting on posture and postural control, thought to related difficulties processing vestibular input 
  • visual perception, form and space perception deficits impacting on visual-motor functions
  • difficulties with visual figure-ground discrimination
  • deficits in auditory and language functions.
  • tactile defensiveness and related sensory reactivity difficulties impacting negatively on attention 

A key feature of Ayres’ Sensory Integration is the adaptive response;  “an adaptive response is a purposeful, goal-directed response to a sensory experience … play consists of a series of adaptive responses that make the sensory integration happen. In turn, as sensory integration develops, better organization and more complex skills are possible” Ayres 2005.

In 2013, Viana et al reported that children with dyslexia show poor performance and variability while relating visual and somatosensory information. Children with dyslexia showed less coherent and more variable body sway;  suggesting difficulties in multisensory integration from sensory cues coming from multiple sources.

 

man in brown jacket holding a book

Studies with adults and children found that there is reduced neurophysiological adaptation in adults and children with dyslexia. In 2016, Perrachione et al published research suggesting that people with dyslexia are likely to have differences in sensory integration and processing, noting significantly reduced adaptation to speech from a consistent voice and less adaptation to the repetition of words, objects, and faces. They provide evidence to support the hypothesis that reading skills in dyslexia are related to the degree of neural adaptation.

In 2017 Wandel and Le confirmed the importance of the effective processing of multiple sensory inputs, including successful sensory integration for competent reading. 

“Successful reading involves the ability to efficiently integrate visual signals with the sounds of speech and the language system; thus, diagnosing the reading circuitry requires testing the cortical and white matter regions that carry reading information from the visual, auditory, and language systems. Reading impairment can result from problems within neural circuits that are used for multiple purposes, not uniquely reading (Rayner et al., 2012, Seidenberg, 2017). Hence, we advocate assessing the circuitry broadly, not just portions that are highly specialized for reading.”

In clinical practice, some children with sensory integration difficulties benefit more from the use of coloured overlays. Research from Kriss and Evans (2005) suggests that 

“Children with dyslexia seem to benefit more from coloured overlays than non‐dyslexic children. MIS and dyslexia are separate entities and are detected and treated in different ways. If a child has both problems then they are likely to be markedly disadvantaged and they should receive prompt treatments appropriate to the two conditions. It is recommended that education professionals as well as eye‐care professionals are alert to the symptoms of MIS and that children are screened for this condition, as well as for other visual anomalies.”

Read the full article: The relationship between dyslexia and Meares‐Irlen Syndrome

Read more here:

Dyslexia link to eye spots confusing brain say scientists.

Dyslexia and Sensory Processing, is there a link?

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Helping Autistic Children Manage the School Christmas Play

Christmas time in school can be difficult for children with additional needs, changes in routine and new experiences can be hard to manage. Here is some advice from Its a Tink Thing with ideas for helping autistic children to be included in the Christmas play.

How to help an autistic child to manage the school Christmas play

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Research Update: Early alterations of social brain networks in young children with autism

In this study, the researchers were able to suggest that there are “frequency specific alterations in the driving of information flow from brain areas implicated in social information processing during the viewing of naturalistic dynamic social images in toddlers and preschool with ASD” and that these occur in the early stages of ASD. These findings support the clinical experience of OT’s and others doing ASI with this client group, that early intervention is critical. The study continues to recommend further studies into social orienting skills as a way of perhaps remediating social brain development while neural plasticity is most optimal.

Wouldn’t it be great if the results we see in clinical practice of ASI, helping children better orientate, attend and respond to sensory input including social cues, studied as a possible intervention in response to this study?

Here is a copy of the abstract and link to the full article.

Social impairments are a hallmark of Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD), but empirical evidence for early brain network alterations in response to social stimuli is scant in ASD. We recorded the gaze patterns and brain activity of toddlers with ASD and their typically developing peers while they explored dynamic social scenes. Directed functional connectivity analyses based on electrical source imaging revealed frequency specific network atypicalities in the theta and alpha frequency bands, manifesting as alterations in both the driving and the connections from key nodes of the social brain associated with autism. Analyses of brain-behavioural relationships within the ASD group suggested that compensatory mechanisms from dorsomedial frontal, inferior temporal and insular cortical regions were associated with less atypical gaze patterns and lower clinical impairment. Our results provide strong evidence that directed functional connectivity alterations of social brain networks is a core component of atypical brain development at early stages of ASD.

https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.31670.001

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Dyslexia and Sensory Processing, is there a link?

Dyslexics show a difference in sensory processing

In 2016 Neuroscientists discovered that a basic mechanism underlying sensory perception is deficient in individuals with dyslexia. The brain typically adapts rapidly to sensory input, such as the sound of a person’s voice or images of faces and objects, as a way to make processing more efficient. But for individuals with dyslexia, the researchers found that adaptation was on average about half that of those without the disorder.
“Dysfunction of Rapid Neural Adaptation in Dyslexia” by Tyler K. Perrachione, Stephanie N. Del Tufo, Rebecca Winter, Jack Murtagh, Abigail Cyr, Patricia Chang, Kelly Halverson, Satrajit S. Ghosh, Joanna A. Christodoulou, and John D.E. Gabrieli was published in Neuron online December 21 2016 doi:10.1016/j.neuron.2016.11.020
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Another study by Jaffe-Dax, Frenkel & Ahissar was published in 2017 in eLife, 6, e20557. http://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.20557 ; “Dyslexics’ faster decay of implicit memory for sounds and words is manifested in their shorter neural adaptation”.
Dyslexia is a reading disability, although why it happens is still not understood.  In the 2017 study, they studied if neural mechanisms underlying dyslexia could be explored using a simple frequency-discrimination task. Participants were asked to compare two tones in each trial – and the study was devised to explore if implicit memory of previous trials affected their responses. They had hypothesized that implicit memory decays faster among dyslexics.
People with dyslexia showed a faster decay of implicit memory effects. They discovered that faster decay of implicit memory also characterised the impact of sound regularities in benefitting dyslexics’ oral reading rate. The study suggests that people with dyslexia had a shorter neural adaptation, with is in contrast to their longer reading times. They hypothesised this is because it reduces their temporal window of integration of past stimuli, resulting in noisier and less reliable predictions for both simple and complex stimuli.