When the input from two eyes is not combined to form a single three-dimensional image, but rather the input from one or the other eye is suppressed, this can be viewed as a problem with sensory integration. In this case the two senses would be the sense of seeing with the left eye and the sense of seeing with the right eye. Even though both senses are of the same kind, their integration is a highly nontrivial process. The fusion of the images seen by two eyes is markedly different, as I now know, from whatever is seen by each eye in isolation. I think it is fair to say that this is directly analogous to fusing the smell and the taste of an apple into a single perceptual unity. There could be similar disorders with fusing the input from both ears.
This should explain, why people with normal vision cannot experience monocular vision by simply closing one eye. When you are buying apples, you are not allowed to taste them. Yet you can still feel to some degree, what this apple tastes like, from the way it looks, smells, and responds to touch. Someone who never tasted an apple would not have the same experience. Even someone who did taste an apple, but with the eyes and nose closed, and without knowing that that was an apple, would not have the same experience either.
You may be able to try the following experiment. Take a trip within your town or city, or even go to some other country, and find ten kinds of fruit that you have never seen before. It doesn't have to be fruit, ten other kinds of food should be fine, too, just make sure that those are very much unlike anything you have experienced before. Start by watching, touch, smelling every fruit. Then, sometime later, close your eyes, close your nose or isolate it from smells (or get a flu), and make someone feed you pieces of these fruits from a spoon, in random order.
When you will later look at the fruits, touch and smell them, you will have no idea, which fruit has which taste. You can surely have some cues: you can sense their response to pressure, and recall what it felt like eating them (although this means using the sense of touch with the lips and tongue and the inside of the mouth, not the same as the sense of taste). Yet once you taste each fruit with your eyes open, this should be a very different experience. It can also feel very satisfactory to finally establish a matching between the experiences of sight,smell,touch and the experiences of taste.
Experiments on animals could be designed along the same lines as experiments for other kinds of sensory integration, such as glasses that shift or rotate the image seen, breaking the integration of the sense of touch and of the muscular reflexes needed to accomplish a specific task with the sense of vision. Similarly, one could make glasses where the image for one eye would be, say, rotated by 180 degrees. Then those can be tried on birds, kittens, and, ultimately, human volunteers, to see if and how the adaption will happen. One can even device electronic glasses that will slowly rotate the image seen by the right eye, but the left eye will receive undisturbed input. If put on, indeed, a young kitten, it will probably lead to the kitten using only the left eye. However, this method has an important advantage as opposed to simulating strabismus by cutting one of the eye muscles: glasses can be removed at some point, so the possibility of recovery can be analyzed.
If autism is indeed a problem with sensory integration, we should be able to learn a lot by comparing autism to binocular disorders.
For example, face recognition had been markedly more difficult for me than it is now. Recognizing three-dimensional faces is much easier; it takes much longer to establish the correspondences to recognize faces "two-dimensionally". Of course, what I am writing is nothing more than pure speculation, however, informed by personal experience. One can argue that after seeing a face from two angles, its three-dimensionality can surely be recovered. I actually suspect that ones you become able to form a continuous image of someone's face in your mind, with the shape of the surface, this would develop the circuitry in the visual cortex that is used for seeing, remembering, and imagining 3-dimensional objects. In dance classes I repeatedly failed to perceive shapes as identical from different angles. I understood them as identical, but I did not perceive them this way. I would study photographs in a book or a video, and I would see how a shape or a movement unfolds from different angles. However, I still had a very clear feeling that I was seeing different things. That is, I was recognizing the shape, but I clearly felt that I looked very different from different angles, and that I had to learn that. Similarly, I remember many occasions when I would look into the mirror and adjust my posture by, say, looking at my pelvis. Yet I would make the adjustment using as a reference the way the pelvis should look when facing the mirror en face, yet I would be standing at an angle, or vice versa. After many, many, many times, I started to recognize that this was not working, and I started to see that the same shape looked different at different angles: one part of my body was maybe above another at one angle, but below at another angle. The angles between different parts of my body looked differently when viewed from different directions. After I recognized it, I allowed myself to learn to correctly retrieve information from different views, and achieved some success in it. Yet, every once in a while I would meet a little girl who would imitate a movement and it would take her seconds to pick up and imitate things that took me many hours to figure out. Usually, though, such a little girl missed many other things, so I did not make any significant conclusions from such cases.
Of course, autism is a much more severe disorder than any binocular problem. However, I still feel we can learn from the parallel, and, perhaps, both ways. Say, a child with an autism looks at a pointing hand instead of at the pointed-at object, whereas a child with a binocular disorder tries to look at the pointed-at object, yet often fails to notice the object because of not understanding the direction of the pointing. Autistic problems with communication are very severe, yet maybe we can find an analogy with the issues with reading body language and determining social distance that I described in a previous post.
I still notice my own patterns of incorrect space perception. Say, I am walking down the street, and suddenly seem annoyed by one of the people in front of me. I would look at this person and feel quite distinctly that this person is in my way or too close to me. Yet I will see, at the same time, that the person is quite far from me, not in my way, and is going in a different direction. If I move to a different point so that the person is seen at a different angle, the sensation of the person being in my way would typically disappear.
Lack of certain sensory integrations can explain the unusual abilities of many individuals with autism. Just how I had to develop a much finer perception and control of certain muscle groups to improve my coordination in dance and other similar activities, being unable to properly rely on my eyes, so people with autism may develop extremely strong compensations to deal with some deficiencies of sensory integration. Then those compensations can become an unusual skill or ability in their own domain .The motivation for the development of these compensations is much higher than the motivation for the development of similar skills in a healthy person, and the distractions are fewer. It is clearly easier to focus on learning basic (survival) things like walking and eating, than playing chess or doing gymnastics.
This should explain, why people with normal vision cannot experience monocular vision by simply closing one eye. When you are buying apples, you are not allowed to taste them. Yet you can still feel to some degree, what this apple tastes like, from the way it looks, smells, and responds to touch. Someone who never tasted an apple would not have the same experience. Even someone who did taste an apple, but with the eyes and nose closed, and without knowing that that was an apple, would not have the same experience either.
You may be able to try the following experiment. Take a trip within your town or city, or even go to some other country, and find ten kinds of fruit that you have never seen before. It doesn't have to be fruit, ten other kinds of food should be fine, too, just make sure that those are very much unlike anything you have experienced before. Start by watching, touch, smelling every fruit. Then, sometime later, close your eyes, close your nose or isolate it from smells (or get a flu), and make someone feed you pieces of these fruits from a spoon, in random order.
When you will later look at the fruits, touch and smell them, you will have no idea, which fruit has which taste. You can surely have some cues: you can sense their response to pressure, and recall what it felt like eating them (although this means using the sense of touch with the lips and tongue and the inside of the mouth, not the same as the sense of taste). Yet once you taste each fruit with your eyes open, this should be a very different experience. It can also feel very satisfactory to finally establish a matching between the experiences of sight,smell,touch and the experiences of taste.
Experiments on animals could be designed along the same lines as experiments for other kinds of sensory integration, such as glasses that shift or rotate the image seen, breaking the integration of the sense of touch and of the muscular reflexes needed to accomplish a specific task with the sense of vision. Similarly, one could make glasses where the image for one eye would be, say, rotated by 180 degrees. Then those can be tried on birds, kittens, and, ultimately, human volunteers, to see if and how the adaption will happen. One can even device electronic glasses that will slowly rotate the image seen by the right eye, but the left eye will receive undisturbed input. If put on, indeed, a young kitten, it will probably lead to the kitten using only the left eye. However, this method has an important advantage as opposed to simulating strabismus by cutting one of the eye muscles: glasses can be removed at some point, so the possibility of recovery can be analyzed.
If autism is indeed a problem with sensory integration, we should be able to learn a lot by comparing autism to binocular disorders.
For example, face recognition had been markedly more difficult for me than it is now. Recognizing three-dimensional faces is much easier; it takes much longer to establish the correspondences to recognize faces "two-dimensionally". Of course, what I am writing is nothing more than pure speculation, however, informed by personal experience. One can argue that after seeing a face from two angles, its three-dimensionality can surely be recovered. I actually suspect that ones you become able to form a continuous image of someone's face in your mind, with the shape of the surface, this would develop the circuitry in the visual cortex that is used for seeing, remembering, and imagining 3-dimensional objects. In dance classes I repeatedly failed to perceive shapes as identical from different angles. I understood them as identical, but I did not perceive them this way. I would study photographs in a book or a video, and I would see how a shape or a movement unfolds from different angles. However, I still had a very clear feeling that I was seeing different things. That is, I was recognizing the shape, but I clearly felt that I looked very different from different angles, and that I had to learn that. Similarly, I remember many occasions when I would look into the mirror and adjust my posture by, say, looking at my pelvis. Yet I would make the adjustment using as a reference the way the pelvis should look when facing the mirror en face, yet I would be standing at an angle, or vice versa. After many, many, many times, I started to recognize that this was not working, and I started to see that the same shape looked different at different angles: one part of my body was maybe above another at one angle, but below at another angle. The angles between different parts of my body looked differently when viewed from different directions. After I recognized it, I allowed myself to learn to correctly retrieve information from different views, and achieved some success in it. Yet, every once in a while I would meet a little girl who would imitate a movement and it would take her seconds to pick up and imitate things that took me many hours to figure out. Usually, though, such a little girl missed many other things, so I did not make any significant conclusions from such cases.
Of course, autism is a much more severe disorder than any binocular problem. However, I still feel we can learn from the parallel, and, perhaps, both ways. Say, a child with an autism looks at a pointing hand instead of at the pointed-at object, whereas a child with a binocular disorder tries to look at the pointed-at object, yet often fails to notice the object because of not understanding the direction of the pointing. Autistic problems with communication are very severe, yet maybe we can find an analogy with the issues with reading body language and determining social distance that I described in a previous post.
I still notice my own patterns of incorrect space perception. Say, I am walking down the street, and suddenly seem annoyed by one of the people in front of me. I would look at this person and feel quite distinctly that this person is in my way or too close to me. Yet I will see, at the same time, that the person is quite far from me, not in my way, and is going in a different direction. If I move to a different point so that the person is seen at a different angle, the sensation of the person being in my way would typically disappear.
Lack of certain sensory integrations can explain the unusual abilities of many individuals with autism. Just how I had to develop a much finer perception and control of certain muscle groups to improve my coordination in dance and other similar activities, being unable to properly rely on my eyes, so people with autism may develop extremely strong compensations to deal with some deficiencies of sensory integration. Then those compensations can become an unusual skill or ability in their own domain .The motivation for the development of these compensations is much higher than the motivation for the development of similar skills in a healthy person, and the distractions are fewer. It is clearly easier to focus on learning basic (survival) things like walking and eating, than playing chess or doing gymnastics.
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