Sensory Integration and Learning Disorders

  • W303 Sensory Integration and Learning Disorders by A. Jean Ayres, Ph.D.

  • Sensory Integration and Learning Disorders

    • Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 72-91446
    • International Standard Book Number: 0-87424-303-3
    • Copyright © 1972 by Western Psychological Services
    • Not to be reproduced in whole or in part without written permission of Western Psychological Services. All rights reserved.
    • Printed in U.S.A.

  • To Franklin

  • LIST OF FIGURES

  • PREFACE

  • CHAPTER 1. OVERVIEW

    • Learning is a function of the brain; learning disorders reflect neural function deviations.
    • Disordered sensory integration accounts for learning disorders.
    • Enhancing sensory integration makes academic learning easier.
    • Sensory integration: ability to organize sensory information for use.
    • Objective: enhance the brain's ability to learn, not teach specific skills.
    • Objective: modification of the neurological dysfunction interfering with learning.
    • Therapy supplements formal classroom instruction/tutoring; it does not substitute it.
    • Therapy mitigates conditions that directly interfere with learning.
    • Learning disorders field stage: proto-science.
    • Methods typically derived from behavioral observations of mature subject (animal or man)
    • Perceptual abnormalities were long recognized in brain-damaged adults.
    • Attention focused to perceptual-motor development in children in the last decade.
    • Early efforts were directed through eye-hand manipulative tasks involving perceptual-motor components where deficiencies lay.
    • The approach was largely cognitive, i.e., the child was expected, with the help of the therapist, to "figure things out" intellectually, usually employing primarily the auditory or visual channels.
    • This revealed a larger underlying sensory integrative problem related to previous developmental steps.
    • Scientific facts regarding the neurological development of sensory integrative processes in the human child are insufficient.
    • Brain research has provided some bases for understanding certain aspects of sensory integration, including perception and other phenomena.
    • Results of basic brain research have been interwoven with those of behavioral observations.
    • Treatment procedures have been devised.
    • It is essential to planning remediation to keep in mind what is assumption and what is fact; assumptions are constantly under test and subject to change.
    • Statistically significant increases in academic learning among young disabled learners with certain types of sensory integrative dysfunction has been demonstrated (Ayres, 1972a).
    • Learning disorders present a situation in which one must base one's action on theoretical reasoning rather than on decisive experimental evidence.
    • A new focus on the problem of learning disorders stimulates further search for an even more effective and comprehensive theory.
    • Truth, like infinity, is to be forever approached but never reached.

  • BASIC PREMISES

    • Man's brain learned how to perceive and learn; each child's brain is designed to follow an orderly, predictable, interrelated sequence of development that results in the capacity for learning.
    • Elementary learning: acquiring the capacity to interpret the environment and to respond appropriately to it.
    • Sequential development: central position in theory.
    • Early developmental steps, determined by evolutionary history, have been "pre-programmed" into the human brain at conception, but ontogenetic experience is necessary for the full expression of the inherent developmental tendencies.
    • Each developmental step is dependent upon a certain degree of maturation of previous steps.
    • Child psychologists accept this contention.
    • Piaget (1952) stressed the sensorimotor stage makes possible meaningful experiences for the child (associations that become the source of sensorimotor intelligence).
    • This then extends itself into reflective intelligence through processes of "accomodation," and "assimilation." Each developmental stage assimilates part of the previous one.
    • He emphasizes sensory integration and response as critical to the early origins of intelligence.
    • Ames and Ilg (1964) emphasize the patterned, lawful, and sequential manner of child development.
    • They have observed "reciprocal interweaving" or "a spiral process reflecting a reincorporation of sequential forms of behavior."

  • Scientific facts regarding the neurological development of sensory integrative processes in the human child are insufficient.

  • Reliance must be placed on inferences drawn from data obtained from study of the brains of subhuman vertebrates, the animals that in some way resemble those from which man evolved and inherited his central nervous system, its mode of development, and its function.

    • According to Herrick (1956), the higher intellectual functions are just as much a product of the evolutionary development as is the human skeleton.
    • Similarly, a child's development of the capacity to learn begins with conception and continues to evolve until it approaches an asymptote.
    • The determinants are the summation and final product of a series of changes, processes, and reactions.
    • Gordon (1956) found biochemical recapitulation of phylogeny in the chicken, suggesting a continuing presence of an appropriate substrate may be a necessary requirement for continued enzyme development.
    • The brain retained some of its older organization and incorporated it into the reorganized state, just as this occurs in the developing child.
    • Green (1958) stated that "The impression is gained that by surgery one can somewhat reverse the evolutionary tide of development." by sectioning the brain at progressively more caudal levels.
    • Even though man inherits some innate adaptive behavioral patterns, their individual maturation and expression are dependent upon ontogenetic experience.
      Environment acts upon innate tendencies molding and modifying them.
      The innate potential for development of sensor}' integration and related adaptive behavior is a substrate for individual development.
    • primitive reflexes are often present
    • the sense of touch is apt to be diffuse rather than well differentiated
    • some children are overly ready with a fight or flight reaction in response to some tactile stimuli
    • It is for these reasons, and not for any direct interest in neurobiology of either current or prehistoric vertebrates, that the evolution of the brain and current mode of function of subhuman verte- brate brains are significant to the theory. deviations in maturation of the child's brain today and what to do about them are the focus of attention in this book.

  • Limitations in Applying Animal Research to Human Beings

  • Differences are present in interspecies and brain research is based on the extinct progenitors of man approximations on those earlier animals

  • Changes have continued at all levels of the nervous system, reducing similarity

  • Species and educators make the mistake in assuming that certain areas of the brain control specific operations. Brain stem and cerebellum show the least amount, but the subcortical is generally overlooked to compensate by educators.

  • Educators trend has been toward corticalization of functions, when activity should move from subcortical up to cortical level (skill movement).

  • As a working hypothesis, it is proposed that the principles that determined the direction of evolutionary development are manifested in the principles that govern the development of the capacity to perceive and learn by each child today.

  • One of the most basic demands of existence is interpreting sensory stimuli and responding to them.

  • at each stage of phylogenesis the animal has a well intergrated neural structure, the loss of spinal cord in humans drastically changs the quality of spinal function and the complexity increased when a new structure was added. For a very long period of time the brain stem including it's upper end functioned as the chief center and then came the cerebral hemispheres to modify stem function and to deal on a more complex level.

  • With the expansion of the cortex the parietal lobe and visual cortex showed greatly. abstract processes. It has been argued that abstract intellectual capacity, such as that required in reading and interpreting that which is read, is in part a product of development involving a steady increase in the quantity as well as the quality of informational transaction between organism and environment. Central to is th eadditional instead of substitute control thru encephalization of function and that nature hesitates to throw anything away by the way of older structures.

  • It is proposed that the answer to the first question lies in great and prolonged "stress" from the environment acting upon an organism with an urge to respond and the capacity for change.

  • The forebrain was first a sensory organ to which motor control then migrated implying that the evolution of the nervous system was molded by an environment full of information that consistently and relentlessly pounded upon the nervous system, bringing about a marked increase in the capacity to receive information and developing the organism's capacity to respond.

  • modalities became sensitive to touch, gravity, and movement

  • Second only to environmental direction is the in which the nervous system reacts to sensations

  • total massive patterning involving overt responses of the entire body, determined by a relatively simple integration. The cerebral hemispheres enabled more discrete, individualistic motor patterns based on more precise interpretation of sensory information

  • It is cognitive funtion is the tap of spinal cord and the rest of it's roots in subcortical structures over it all.

  • CHAPTER 2
    It is mans brain that allows him to know his environment and it’s functions, given this assumption some interference with brain function is present at the root of learning disabilities the remediation
    Subsequent chapters review neural functions specifically related to the sensory integrative processes critical to learning.

  • Functional Interdependence of brain structures

  • perception and elementary cognition may be customarily attributed to the cortex but there is no dependence and there is locality between parts.

  • Livanov, Gavrilova, and Aslanov (1964) found electrical activity to differe depending on type of mental activities.

  • Concept of brain mechanisms

  • Mechanism