Ontario Center for Special Needs

1. Vestibular (movement-balance)
This is the king of all of the senses and the most powerful system. It is also what people are least aware of. The vestibular sense is your three-dimensional “you are here” marker, allowing you to understand where your body is in relation to the ground. The receptors for this sense are located in the vestibule in the inner ear: it indicates where you are relative to the ground and other objects.

2. Proprioceptive (body position)
This is your body awareness system. It is the “left hand knows what your right hand is doing” sense. It tells you where all of your body parts are relative to the others and how they are moving in relation to each other. Proprioceptive processing difficulties are usually linked with tactile or vestibular processing difficulties. Note: deep-pressure input, which stimulates the proprioceptive receptors, has a calming impact on the nervous system.

3. Tactile (touch)
This is your touching sense. It tells you what is in contact with your body and gives you information related to pain, pressure, temperature, movement, size, texture, and shape. Your touch sense is divided into two categories, your defensive system and your discriminative system. The defensive system is your protective touch system that alerts you to potentially harmful stimuli, such as a mosquito landing on your arm or the faint touch of a stranger behind you. The discriminative system is the part of your touch sense that gives you information about the physical nature of the objects you are touching or those that are touching you, where on the body you are being touched, temperature, as well as the pressure of what is touching you.

4. Auditory (hearing)
This is your hearing sense. It allows you to locate, capture, and discriminate sounds. The receptors for the auditory system are located in your inner ear and share some of the nerve fibers with the vestibular system. Auditory sensitivities (termed auditory defensiveness) are among the early concerns reported by parents of children who receive a neurological diagnosis, such as autism, Asperger’s, or sensory processing disorder.

5. Visual (seeing)
This is your seeing sense. It provides you with information about color, shape, distance of objects from one another, as well as movement of objects and people. The small muscles of your eyes are controlled by your vestibular system.

6. Gustatory (taste)
This is your tasting sense: it is one of two “chemilal” senses. By detecting the chemicals of foods, it gives you information about the things that enter your mouth. Coincidentally, natural chemicals that taste good are pertinent for survival.

7. Olfactory (smell)
This is your smelling sense, the other of the two “chemical” senses. By sensing chemicals in the air, it registers and categorizes information about the odors you encounter. As with food, natural chemicals that smell good often indicate safety. The part of your brain dedicated to analyzing this information has a direct neural link to the limbic system (emotional center of the brain). Many people with autism report smell sensitivities.

All of these senses:

Depends on each other and are integrated with the other. As such difficulties in one system are likely to impact another system.

For example, if your child has difficulty processing visual input that will impact him when he is in school and needs to copy from a board or read from a book.

Difficulties in these systems can also impact a child socially, because where and how a person’s body relates and interacts to its surrounding is the kind of he or she will likely need to feel secure in new environments and around new people.

If your child is sensitive to touch, he will likely experience difficulties with fine motor skills that are related to academics and self- care skills.

Sensory sensitivities

Sensory sensitivities can impede a child’s participation in activities that would otherwise be considered fun or or enticing for most children. There are many sensory activities that are designed to increase sensory exposure in a fun, safe way that will help children with sensory disorders become more comfortable with uncomfortable sensation.
When playing with your child/student who is sensory-sensitive, try to start with the activities that use deep-pressure input along with exposure to tactile or movement input.
Deep pressure input has a calming effect on the nervous system, counteracting the reactions to sensory input that would otherwise be perceived as noxious. As adults we can relate to the calming effects of deep pressure-input when we’ve been on the receiving end of a firm hug or deep tissue massage.

If you see that your child is beginning to pull back from a particular sensory that is a normal part of a given activity, alter the activity or move on to another one. Many of the activities and games offer differing levels as well as ways to do them with different materials. Also, using visual cues for children who have sensory processing difficulties (which is most children with neurological difficulties) helps decrease anxiety, since they know what to expect. If they can see what is coming next, it will help them become more comfortable with activity.

If your sensory-sensitive child is non-verbal, pay increased attention to any physiological reactions to input such as sweating, darting eyes, heavy breathing, and agitated movements. These are signs that your child is having a fright reaction (sometimes refered to as fight or flight) to the sensory input or his perception of the input. The term fight or flight is that the physiological response is fright that then may result in fight-flight, or fort-type behaviors, such as being physically aggressive towards those around them, running away from a situation, simply fixating the eyes in an attempt to block out the stimuli, or forting themselves from the outside world.

Integrating peers

Once your student/child has been exposed to different types of play, such as sensory or motor activities, and has developed an understanding of simple rules for traditional games, integrating peers into the play situations is the next step and is key to helping your child/student expand his capabilities.

By teaching your child/student specific skills that are essential for play, such as reciprocating the actions of another, maintaining attention on an activity, as well as engaging in representational use of objects, you supply the child with the tools of peer play. This gives the child an inroad to being a part of their peers’ social world. As your child begins to successfully interact with peers in play, your child will be able to learn from his or her peers in turn, requiring less adult direction.

Sensory procesing and sensory integration

Sensory processing and sensory integration are terms that therapists often use synonymously.

Sensory processing is a broad term that refers to the way in which the central and peripheral nervous systems manage incoming sensory information from the senses. It encompasses the reception, modulation, integration, and organization of sensory stimuli, including the behavioral responses to sensory input.

Sensory integration refers to the process of combining sensory information from one’s body and the environment in a manner that leads to adaptive responding.

Sensory integration is the dynamic processing and organizing of information from multiple sensory systems. It requires sensory information to be initially detected and registered as meaningful, then modulated as it is processed centrally, and then responded to in a way that matches the stimuli.

This process of continual regulation and organization of reactions to sensory input in a graded and adaptive manner is known as sensory modulation.

Typically, after modulation, an adaptive response to the input is made.

When sensory input is properly modulated , optimal levels of arousal are achieved and maintained. From this optimal arousal base, an individual is more capable of motor performance and engagement in preferred occupations.

Conversely, when sensory modulation is inadequate, the individual has difficulty regulating and organizing the sensory information to allow for adaptive responding. With inadequate sensory modulation, an individual can demonstrate over responsivity, under responsivity, or inconsistent responsivity to environmental inputs. In turn, such responding further compromises arousal.

Sensory Processing in Individuals
Sensory processing: The way that a person perceives, processes & organizes the information that they receive through their senses - hearing, sight, touch, smell, taste & movement. This sensory information comes from one's own body & the environment around you.
Sensory Integration: Refers to the process of combining sensory input from one's body & the environment in a manner that leads to adaptive responding.

Four A's of Behaviour

The 4 A's

Lester and colleagues (Lester, Freier & LaGasse) described human behavior in the context of the “4 A's”; arousal, attention, affect and action. The 4As serve as a key to understanding how children understand and interact with their environment. Each of these processes is reciprocal; each is influenced by and has an influence on the others. For example, the ability to accomplish an action depends on sustained attention, which depends on the ability to maintain an alert state. Successfully achieving a task then influences the alert state, attention and affect. Therefore, all learning and development are predicated on adequate functioning of the 4 A's.

This framework is a useful way of describing the outcomes of sensory processing . The 4 A's provide a mechanism for summarizing and grouping sensory processing deficit found in individuals with an ASD.

Analyzing the 4 As shows the dependency of one process on the others and the important contributions of each to sensory processing. As a result of this independence, children with sensory-processing disorders may have difficulty detecting and registering sensory input, filtering stimuli, habituating to familiar stimuli, and formulating an adaptive response. With inaccurate sensory processing, output impairments may manifest in an inability to consistently respond adaptively to sensory input, inconsistent attending, poor ability to modulate arousal, delayed gross and fine motor development, or praxis (motor planning) deficits. These deficits may in turn lead to communication and social impairments.