Systematic Identification of Perceptual Disabilities in Autistic Children

Abstract

Matching-to-sample tasks were used to test the ability of six autistic children to make visual, vocal, and fine motor responses in response to visual and auditory stimuli. The results indicated that: the testing method was appropriate for low-functioning children; the group was heterogeneous with respect to perceptual deficits; and fine motor performance was poor. The data suggest that a basic difficulty in infantile autism may not be an avoidance of auditory and visual stimuli per se but rather a deficit in ability to make cross-modal associations. It is further suggested that the testing method would be useful for constructing profiles of perceptual disabilities with many types of low-functioning children.