What is the usual development of eye contact in babies? When do they begin to use two eyes together, develop depth perception enough to reach for objects and understand where their body is in space? When and how do babies develop hand-eye co-ordination, develop visual memory as part of fine motor skills development and self feeding? What are the visual perceptual milestones toddlers go through to develop visualisation skills?

I heard from someone who say their mother knew they were autistic as a newborn because they had no eye contact. Temple Grandin feels that her engineer-level skills as a visual thinker are because she’s autistic and refers back to having normal language comprehension and highly developed ability to translate words into images from at least 3 years old. There are those who feel their fine motor skills in doing embroidery or very fine work are part of being ‘an autistic’. So what, as an autism consultant, do I see in the visual perceptual behaviours of children with autism?

I see children who can’t co-ordinate the use of two eyes together, convergence required for depth perception, for perception of dimension. I see those who use ‘spotting’ with their vision flitting from fragment to unrelated fragment, who can’t do linear tracking, those who can’t filter out background from foreground information, those who don’t respond to anything unless it moves or makes noise, who use mouthing and textures, sounds, movement to recognise things, who paw their parents but otherwise scan them from fragment to unrelated fragment or stare through them. I see children who lose track of anything out of their hands or insist on objects not moving anywhere so they can return to their placement in order to find them, those who can replay a DVD they’ve seen but can’t come up with something novel, those who spend much of their play exploring their own visual perceptual anomalies they can’t understand.

Children with significant untreated visual perceptual disorders will struggle to acquire receptive language processing. They may retain long strings of routes they’ve taken or DVDs they’ve repeatedly seen or heard but will struggle to acquire less ‘serial’ visual and verbal memory for simple every day experiences. They may be able to rote learn PECS cards and flick through books but not be able to recognise the pictures as a whole.

It’s time we stopped talking about high and low functioning autism, stopped stupidly confusing exploration of visual perceptual disorders as ‘stims’, stopped romanticising that exceptional visualisation skills have anything to do with autism (visual thinking is the most common mode of thought in human beings), started at least distinguishing which children with autism had unusual vision related behaviours and put behavioral opthamologists to the front of our treatment queues to address significant visual perceptual disorders in children BEFORE we call it all ‘the autism’.

Donna Williams, BA Hons, Dip Ed.
Author, artist, singer-songwriter, screenwriter.
Autism consultant and public speaker.

http://www.myspace.com/nobodynowherethefilm
http://www.donnawilliams.net
http://www.aspinauts.com