New study may explain why children with autism are different in how they learn

July 10, 11:40 PMCedar Rapids Special Needs Kids ExaminerSharon Gillson

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A new study, published in the journal Nature Neuroscience, examined patterns of movement as children diagnosed with autism and those without autism learned how to use a new tool.

The researchers, who were from the Kennedy Krieger Institute and Johns Hopkins University School of Medical, wanted to see if children with autism learn new actions differently than do children not diagnosed with autism.

The findings of this study suggests that children with autism relied more on their internal sense of body position (referred to as proprioception), whereas the children not diagnosed with autism relied more on visual information from the world around them to learn new movement.

The researchers also found that the greater the children relied on proprioception, the greater the child's impairment in social and motor skills, and imitation.

To study the models formed in the brain when children with autism learn a new movement, researchers measured patterns of generalization as 14 children with autism and 13 typically developing children learned to reach using a new tool. They then examined how well children were able to generalize what they learned in two separate ways – one that detected how much they relied on visual information to guide learning and one that detected how much they relied on proprioceptive information to guide learning.

The researchers state the study findings support findings from previous studies suggesting that autism may be associated with abnormalities in the wiring of the brain, specifically with overdevelopment of short range white matter connections between neighboring brain regions and underdevelopment of longer distance connections between distant brain regions. The brain regions involved in proprioception are closely linked to motor areas, while visual-motor processing depends on more distant connections.

“These findings not only demonstrate why children with autism have difficulty learning motor skills, but also provide real insight into why these children have difficulty learning to interact with the world around them,” said Dr. Reza Shadmehr, senior study author and Professor of Biomedical Engineering and Neuroscience at the John Hopkins University School of Medicine. “If the way their brain is wired is not allowing them to rely as much as typically developing children on external visual cues to guide behavior, they may have difficulty learning how to interact with other people and interpret the nature of other people’s actions.”