THE EFFECTIVENESS OF MULTISENSORY ACTIVITIES IN THE EDUCATIONAL DEVELOPMENT OF CHILDREN WITH AUTISM SPECTRUM DISORDER

Sensory integration is a process by which the central nervous system organizes various sensory stimuli that provide adaptive responses to environmental demands. However, children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) may lead to adaptive responses interrupted interaction and lost to a changing environment. According to the United Nations, as a criterion which considers only those with ASD, six out of every thousand children have this disorder in the world. It is estimated that in Brazil, about 2 million children have ASD at some level. The ASD includes autism spectrum disorders, different childhood psychosis, Asperger's, Kanner and Rett syndromes. They express language difficulties as the body in initiating and maintaining a conversation, avoid eye contact, and show aversion to touch, isolating themselves. Changes in attention, concentration and motor coordination possibly can also be observed. Usually, they can make contact through nonverbal behaviors and to play, prefer to stick to objects instead of moving with the other children. Scientists have shown that the somatosensory and vestibular systems together to promote the overall development of behavior and that stimulation through sensory activities contextualized produces neurophysiological changes in the pattern of activation of neural networks, which records and organizes the different entries for more adaptive responses. The objective of this study was to evaluate the effectiveness of multisensory integration activities developed by Uniform Movement Reeducation Cognitive-motor Ltda., Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and applied to 28 children of both sexes aged 3 to 6 years, diagnosed with ASD. Behavioral observation was conducted and evaluation by the Sensory Profile test records and how they reacted to this enriched environment. The children were divided into two groups, children verbal and nonverbal children who participated in two workshops. The first workshop, entitled "musicking" ("make music"), explored the auditory-visual integration through concrete perception of musical instruments and sounds, which requires complex multimodal skills involving the simultaneous perception of different sensory modalities. The second workshop, "Movie is: when the animation" explores the environmental changes in texture, light and sound to avoid the perception of how the animations presented during the exhibition takes place. Bodily reactions of children (language) were evaluated for six monitors as behavioral characteristics answers "as desire to remain in or to return to the site after the session, smile or cry, expressions of emotion and point the finger. Our results showed a response increased after participatory workshops in 80% of participants, which suggests that sensory integration stimulated by enriched environments presents multisensory and cultural workshops promoted more adaptive responses to the environment. This effect may be related to attention, probably generating increased intrasensorial discrimination ASD in children who have difficulty performing common tasks. After performing whole sequence of proposed activities, our conclusion was that stimulation and correct explanations ASD allow children to participate in cultural and social activities requiring appropriate and multi-sensory skills behavior.