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Understanding Asperger Syndrome:
Sensory Integration Dysfunction

Visual = Sight

Location Eye (Retina)
Stimulated by light

Function

Ocular Control

  • Coordinated eye movement needed to track, follow, scan and fix on visual stimuli

Visual Perception

  • The ability to discriminate and interpret visual stimuli

The Visual System and AS

Ocular Difficulties Behavioral Response
  • Finding and tracking moving objects
  • Scanning environment
  • Shifting focus from one thing to another
  • Eye-hand coordination
  • Sustaining eye contact
  • Anxiety and avoidance
    behaviors around tasks that
    involve visual motor skills, including reading
  • Head held close to task at hand, including reading, writing, eating
  • Difficulty with non-verbal communication
Visual Perception Challenges: Behavioral Response
  • Visual spatial relations
  • Depth perceptions
  • Visual figure ground
  • Position in space
  • Bumping and running into people and objects
  • Clumsy when performing tasks that require height and distance discrimination, or depth perception
  • Fine motor deficits

Visual Hypersensitivity

The person with AS may:

  • Exhibit avoidance behaviors and anxiety in brightly lit environments (classrooms, offices, outdoor sunlight)

  • Easily distracted and agitated by visual stimuli in the environment

  • Difficulty discriminating which visual stimuli to focus on

  • Fixated on moving stimuli at the expense of focusing on appropriate fixed stimuli

  • Emotional/aggressive reaction to acute visual stimuli

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