Sight

The verdict is still out on how sight is affected. It isn’t as clear-cut as levels of sensation were with touch. But we’re not dealing with the simple 20/20 parameters of levels of sight. That would be easy to fix with glasses. No, we’re addressing other aspects of sight that go beyond the regular “Big E” charts.

Often you’ll hear the mother of a child with autism questioning how her child can look at a table, the lawn, or a toy for hours. There are children who can see even microscopically. This makes the “ism” of their studying a plain object understandable. They aren’t looking at a table, the lawn or a toy – they are studying the cellular structure of the mahogany, the blade of Bahia, or the cotton fibers of their stuffed bear. They are seeing it at a level that we would need a digital microscope to view.

Some children can detect movement or people at an unusual level. They can see thermal patterns around people and objects. They can detect heat signatures of items. We’re not really sure what they see as it isn’t like a mechanical device works, but does have some interesting properties.

There are some children who can’t see the whole picture. They see the world as dozens of detached images. After I interviewed a child and his parents about this ability I felt the best way to describe this visual perception is having you imagine a wall filled with separate TV screens. One image is broadcast over the wall among the different screens. An eye is in one screen. An ear is spread between two different TV sets. The nose spans three in the middle of the wall. The son couldn’t see a whole contiguous face. He saw parts of the face in different boxes of his vision. If he tried hard enough he could understand it to be a face, just as you or I could see the face if we stood far enough back from the wall of TV screens to see the pattern. But can you imagine life around you as separate boxes of images that you have to move or manipulate to see an image of the scene in front of you.

Another child’s vision might best be described as “stop motion.” It’s as if they can see each frame in a movie. These children love watching “special effects” and see distinctions in motion that we “normals” can’t detect. It is like their vision is runs at a different speed than ours does. Our brain can fit in the pieces in an animation and we see motion. Yet, they see separate and distinct drawings linked together.

Our son, Trent had a common vision problem among the autistic community. His peripheral vision was dominant. His macular, or straightforward vision was subdominant or blurry compared to his peripheral vision. This explains one of the common complaints that the child doesn’t make eye contact. Well, they are. They just can focus and see you better out of the corner of their eye than looking straight at you. It is no indication of being rude or “out of it.” It is a physical problem. With Trent we did years of macular therapy and as his macular vision improved so did his so-called eye contact. It is not wise or kind to treat a physical problem as a behavior issue. Too many children with autism have undergone abusive behavior modification to fix this vision issue.

Of course, there are the general vision problems of hyperopia, myopia, astigmatism to deal with, but those are typical of any children. What the parent of a child with autism has to cope with is the additional vision issues that their child might be trying to overcome. Don’t ever assume that when you say “What is this?” when you are pointing to a ball, that you child can’t comprehend what he should be looking at and what in the sea of images his brain is translating is what you want him to describe.

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