Browsing by Author "Etholén, Saku"

Autism spectrum disorders are pervasive developmental disorders that are manifest early in development. Two wide symptom categories are problems in social communication and repetitive or restrictive behaviors. There are many views for the mechanisms behind autism. Many explanations see deviations in attention and sensory processing as central causes. Intersensory redundancy hypothesis (IRH) states that already in infancy attentional resources are first focused on information that is amodal (redundant for many modalities) like temporal synchrony. Only after this are modality specefic properties like the tone of voice or facial characteristics of a talker focused on. This attentional hierarcy helps socioemotional and verbal development by focusing attention to social stimuli which have much amodal information and opportunities for learning. Bahrick considers one cause of autism to be an early bias in attention. Autistic children and their siblings who have high risk for autism have been found to focus less on amodal information and more on modality specific information compared to typically developing children. This bias may cause deficiencies in learning because social stimuli are neglected and objects or details are preferred, which would explain the problems of social communication. Also restricted and repetitive behaviors could be explained to be a way of organizing amodal information to a better anticipated or understood form by repeating the same behavior. IRH has been found to apply in different situations and ages. The connection between autism and IRH has, however, little evidence to show for it even if the logic behind the connection is plausible. In future, the processing of multimodal and amodal information as possible factors behind autism spectrum disorders should be researched more thoroughly and with scientific rigour.