in autism therapies, focus on priority input most of the time, than just giving see and do activities to keep hold engaged - Dr Kondekar
First build the input, then expect the output
One of the most important principles in developmental intervention is often overlooked:
Without initiating cognition through meaningful input, working only on output is like losing the learning window.
A child does not learn merely by being trained to produce a response.
The usual developmental sequence is:
INPUT → ATTENTION → PROCESSING → COGNITION → RESPONSE → LEARNING
The child first receives information through the senses, attends to it, recognises its meaning, connects it with previous experiences, and then produces an appropriate response.
Over time, repeated meaningful experiences build cognition, communication and learning.
Therefore, if we spend most of our effort trying to pro
duce an output—making the child say a word, imitate an action, make eye contact, perform an exercise or follow a command—without ensuring that the child is actually receiving, attending to and processing meaningful information, we may be training a response without adequately developing the underlying learning process.
Output without meaningful input is not the same as learning.
This distinction is particularly important in autism.
Human input is different from object-based sensory input
Children learn about the social and verbal world primarily through interaction with people.
For development of verbal cognition, language, social understanding and social communication, the child needs rich, meaningful human-to-human experiences.
The eyes and ears are particularly important channels for this.
A child watches a person's face, observes gestures and actions, listens to voice, language, intonation and emotional expression, and gradually learns to connect these inputs with meaning.
For example:
A parent points toward a ball.
The child looks at the parent.
The child follows the parent's gaze or gesture.
The child sees the ball.
The parent says, “Ball.”
The child hears the word while seeing the object and the person's communicative intention.
Repeated experiences gradually allow the child to connect:
person → eyes → ears → object → word → meaning → intention → response.
This is fundamentally different from providing only object-based sensory experiences.
Touch, movement, pressure, textures, vibration, proprioceptive input and vestibular experiences can be useful for sensory regulation and can support participation in learning. However, an object touching the child's skin is not equivalent to a person communicating with the child's eyes and ears.
A textured toy can provide tactile information.
A swing can provide vestibular and proprioceptive information.
A vibrating object can provide sensory input.
But none of these, by themselves, provides the rich social information contained in a human face, human voice, gesture, shared attention, emotional expression and reciprocal interaction.
Therefore, sensory input should not become a substitute for social input.
The child needs people, not just sensory experiences
This is an important distinction when planning intervention.
If the primary developmental goal is:
sensory regulation, appropriate sensory-motor experiences may help.
If the goal is:
language, verbal cognition, social cognition, communication and socialisation, the child needs meaningful interaction with people.
The intervention should therefore progressively move toward:
Human → Eyes → Ears → Attention → Understanding → Cognition → Communication → Social participation.
The objective is not simply to make the child tolerate more sensory stimulation.
The objective is to help the child notice meaningful information, understand it, use it and learn from it.
Why this matters in the learning window
Early childhood is a period of enormous developmental plasticity. Every day provides opportunities for the brain to learn from experience.
If a child spends large amounts of time receiving passive sensory stimulation while receiving relatively little meaningful human communication, we may be providing plenty of input without providing the type of input most relevant to language and social cognition.
Similarly, if therapy concentrates almost entirely on producing visible outputs without first establishing attention, comprehension and meaningful cognition, the child may learn to perform an isolated response without acquiring the broader skill.
Therefore, intervention should ask two questions:
“What output do we want?”
and, more importantly,
“What input does the child's brain need to understand before that output can become meaningful?”
This changes the philosophy of therapy.
We should not merely train the child to look, speak, sit, imitate or obey.
We should help the child see, listen, attend, understand, think, communicate and participate.
That is the difference between training an output and building a learner.
The goal of intervention is not merely a better-performing child.
The goal is a better-learning child
Comments
Post a Comment
https://speechandsenses.blogspot.com/p/httpsspeechandsenses.html read before you comment