"There are children in my class who respond to my verbal instructions and questions with some delay. John, Helen and Vicky need at least a few minutes to understand and answer my questions as if they were far away and it took the sound waves some time to reach them.. Alex sometimes gives responses even a few days later. You must be a detective to connect his 'announcements' with the question he was asked a week before. For an outsider, his responses, unconnected to the present situation, seem weird. Does time seem faster for them while we think these kids are 'slow', I wonder?" (From Teacher's Diary)
It is not uncommon for autistic children to exhibit delayed responses to stimuli. A person can be delayed on every sensory channel.
Concerning vision, VanDalen (1995) attempts to give one of the possible explanations of this phenomenon: the acquisition of the full meaning requires some observation time from different points of view; besides, people with autism must translate perceptual images into their proper terminology.
Perception by parts requires a great amount of time and effort to interpret the whole. Many autistic individuals emphasize the amount of 'thinking' necessary to make sense of the world. VanDalen describes the process as 'thinking in the background' - constructing the object by using explicit trains of thought, whereas for non-autistic people this process is automatic and effortless. To illustrate the point VanDalen describes how he (a person with autism) perceives objects:
"When I am confronted with a hammer, I am initially not confronted with a hammer at all but solely with a number of unrelated parts: I notify a cubical piece of iron, within its neighborhood a coincidental bar-like piece of wood. After that, I am struck by the coincidental nature of the iron and the wooden thing resulting in the unifying perception of a hammer-like configuration. The name "hammer" is not immediately within the reach but appears when the configuration has been sufficiently stabilized over time. Finally, the use of a tool becomes clear when I realize that this perceptual configuration, known as "hammer", can be used to do carpenter's work" (VanDalen, 1995)
The experience of 'delayed hearing' happens when the question/instruction has been sensed and recorded without interpretation until the second (internalized) hearing (i.e. processing of the received message). They may be able to repeat back what has been said without comprehension that will come later. In less extreme cases, to process something takes seconds or minutes. Sometimes it takes days, weeks, months. In the most extreme cases, it can take years to process what has been said. The words, phrases, sentences, sometimes the whole situations are stored and they can be triggered at any time.
| Here's the follow-up discussion on this article: | View all related messages |
For a complete listing of article comments, questions, and other discussions related to Olga Bogdashina's Autistic Behaviour topic, please visit the Discussions page.