EFFECTS OF SENSORY INPUT AND SENSORY DOMINANCE ON SEVERELY DISTURBED, AUTISTIC CHILDREN AND ON SUBNORMAL CONTROLS

Sensory dominance in children differs with age, development and experience and may be a diagnostic differential in the case of autistic children. This hypothesis was explored in three experiments with autistic children, one concerned with sensory dominance, one with sense discrimination learning and one with the dynamics of this learning process. Imbecile children of the same performance I.Q. were used as controls. The experiments showed that psychotic and control children responded most readily to light stimuli, but that this was followed by response to touch stimuli in the autistic children, and by response to sound stimuli in the controls. Differential rewarding resulted in dominance changes to the same extent in each group. However, autistic children did not learn to suppress a previously dominant stimulus orientation habit as quickly as the controls.