autism and eye contact

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OT Research Study: Parent Wanted! Parent Strategies for Increasing Eye Contact in Children with ASD – Please help 3 OT graduates with a survey.


Autism and Eye Contact

Autism and Eye Contact

As occupational therapy graduate students we hope to find ways to improve the quality of life of children diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) as well as their families. The goal of our research study is to identify methods parents have found to be the most successful for increasing their child’s eye contact and decreasing the amount of time their child spends visually perseverating (fixating on an object for an inappropriate period of time). Deficits in social communication are common in the ASD community, which can result in decreased social competence; thus, impacting the individual’s ability to use effective social strategies to interact with others, including initiating interactions, responding appropriately to others, solving conflicts, and maintaining sustained engagement in social interaction.

Children with ASD commonly have characteristic deficits in social-emotional reciprocity, nonverbal communication such as facial expression, gestures, eye contact, joint attention tasks, and rote and imaginative play, which can negatively impact their ability to orient and attend to social tasks, and engage in socializing. For many, eye contact skills are an important skill necessary for the development of social, cognitive, and language skills.


Several strategies have been found to be effective for increasing eye contact in children with ASD. Researchers have found that interventions during play, such as withholding items until the child requests them while making eye contact, reinforced the child’s behavior toward making eye contact. Strategies during play have also been used to increases eye contact in a child with ASD. These strategies include placing one’s face by a toy the child is interested in, imitating the child’s actions, or putting a preferred item out of reach and waiting for the child to make eye contact. Research has found that parents who imitated their child’s actions and used a preferred activity to engage the child, such as singing to them or wrapping them in a blanket, improved eye contact throughout the length of the parents’ interactions with their children. Other parental strategies include the use positive affect such as laughing, clapping, playful tones, and physical affection.
Through this study it is hoped that there will be a better understanding of the type of strategies (e.g., language, touch, auditory, visual-technology, object, exaggerated body placements, or other strategies) that improve eye gaze and eye contact. A benefit of this study will be to provide occupational therapists and other professionals, working with families of children with ASD, the ability to develop treatment plans according to what caregivers have found to be successful for decreasing visual perseveration and increasing eye contact.

If you or anyone you know are interested in participating in this study, please follow the link below:

https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/ASDparentstrategies

Thank you for your time.

Laura Perez, Macy Rhea Crenshaw, Divya Sakaria

Leave a comment Posted on Autism, Mental health

Life with Aspergers Syndrome, ADHD, Bipolar disorder and Irlen Syndrome- check out the videos of Tom Schofield


TomTheOne

TomTheOne

A few days ago Tom Schofield got in touch to tell us about his YouTube video channel The Tom One.

Tom shares “Hello everyone, I’m Tom and I’m a 26 year old man with Asperger’s Syndrome, ADHD, Bipolar disorder and Irlen Syndrome. I got my first diagnosis when I was five years old and that was ADHD after my primary school said I was too much of a wild child. A few years later at age 8, I was given a diagnosis of Asperger’s Syndrome and finally some accommodations were made for me at school.

At 21 I was dragged to the doctor by my then wife after experiencing extreme mood swings over a period of several months and he diagnosed me with bipolar disorder, then a few years later at 26, I saw a specialist optician after complaining about extreme light sensitivity that had plagued me my whole life, and it had started becoming worse. He told me that I had a form of vision disorder called Irlen Syndrome, a condition that is very common in autistic people, but not exclusive to us. It’s where your eyes function as usual (meaning you can have visual disorders and still have this) but your brain can’t perceive the visual input properly.



I made these videos because I wanted to help people understand autism a little better, and hopefully offer some insight into what it’s like to live with day in and day out. More videos will be done in the future, including some involving some of my friends, who are also autistic.”

He goes on “I made the videos because there was a lot of research done on autism, but hardly any of it was done by autistic people themselves, never mind portrayed it from a perspective that knew how it felt to be in these situations. I got tired of people misunderstanding behaviour from us as bad or strange, when they didn’t understand the reason. I also wanted to help parents understand their autistic children a little better.”

You can watch Tom’s videos which cover such topics as loneliness, eye contact and sensory overload by clicking on this link.

Leave a comment Posted on Autism, Patient Talk

Improving eye contact in children diagnosed with autism – A guest post from Dr. Sonya Doherty

Dr. Sonya Doherty

Dr. Sonya Doherty

Welcome to our latest guest post from Dr. Sonya Doherty. You can read the original post on her blog here. Dr. Sonya Doherty is a licensed and board certified Naturopathic Doctor who is an active member of the CAND. Sonya Doherty completed her undergraduate training at the University of Western Ontario in a Bachelor of Science Honors Kinesiology program.

You may be interested in the results of some recent research we ran into autism and eye contact!

She writes:-
Does your child look out of the sides of their eyes?
Does your child watch their fingers while they move them in front of their eyes or tract them along surfaces?
Does your child like to watch wheels spinning?
Does your child look away from people instead of seeking eye contact?

Eye contact is a treatable and reversible symptom of autism spectrum disorder.

Impairment in visual integration has been implicated in autism spectrum disorder.  Recently I watched an incredible TED TALK called How Brains Learn to Seeby Dr. Pawan Sinha. Dr. Sinha’s research is showing that the ability to perceive information relies on motion.  Dynamic information processing may be what the brain relies on to learn to see. Motion allows that brain to process information.  The visual information, when processed properly, is then integrated or grouped together so the brain can make sense of the data.  This information is then acted on by organizing the motor steps required to take action.  To talk and to move; including making eye contact.  The eyes are the finest of the fine motor skills.  Visual motor planning relies on processing information.  If a child wants to look at you, they need the visual processing centers in the brain working so they can integrate the information and then act on it.

So, you more than likely opened this blog because someone you love is having trouble making eye contact. If it is your child, very few people can understand the despair that you feel when your child doesn’t look at you when you come home from work or when you call their name. There are very effective and safe treatments to improve eye contact. I know this because I have seen astonishing improvements in eye contact and visual processing in the thousands of children we support with biomedical treatments.  Let’s explore some of these treatments and how they work.

According to Dr. Meg Megson, autism may be a disorder linked to disruption of G proteins that control cellular signalling.  These G proteins are important for normal retinoid receptor function which allows for healthy visual processing.  So, what damages G proteins?  There is a potential role of vaccinations in G protein defects. 

Vitamin A may reconnect the retinoid receptors critical for vision, sensory perception, language processing and attention.  I also believe that social development is heavily dependent on visual processing.  Our children learn by seeing our reactions.  Picking up social cues visually is very important to optimize social development. What if your child who has trouble making eye contact and avoids peers is having trouble processing visual data?  What if, they are a social being, forced to isolate themselves because their world is blurry.  When a child’s world becomes blurry, as in regressive autism, there will undoubtedly be behavioural issues that arise. Autism is a very complex disorder. The visual processing defects have massive implications on quality of life.  Repairing visual integration, not only helps your child feel better, it opens doors to language, social and cognitive development.  Eye contact is a treatable and reversible symptom of autism spectrum disorder.  The first step is using a specific form of vitamin A to repair G proteins and begin the healing needed to re-establish healthy visual processing.

Dr. Sonya Doherty, ND FMAPS(candidate)

Natural Care Clinic