Similar to a mainstream school setting, Celebrate the Children, a school for children with autism, lines its hallways with colorful banners, photographs, and student artwork. Parents concerned with some of their children’s hypersensitivities often ask Monica Osgood, the school’s director, if there is too much stimulation. Monica responds that her students need to learn in ‘real’ world settings if they will ever have a chance to use their acquired skills outside of the classroom. This logic for replicating ‘neuro-typical’ environments, argues directly against the sensory sensitive approach, and, with reasons worth exploring. Individuals with autism often have very poor generalization skills. Therefore proponents of ‘neuro-typical’ simulated environments claim that sensory sensitive environments actually cause less, not more, universal access and integration into the larger population. Whether or not there is any truth to this claim is unknown. There are strong arguments for and against the ‘neuro-typical’ approach, but there are no definitive studies comparing the sensory sensitive approach to the ‘neuro-typical’ approach.
The first argument for the ‘neuro-typical’ approach is an argument against the prevalence of sensory difficulties in autism. Developmental Psychologist Uta Frith writes, “a question mark hangs over the sensory phenomena, which are often reported but not currently required for diagnosis.” Psychologists Meena O’neil and Robert Jones found that much of the early sensory research and conclusions suffer “from serious methodical limitations.” Many of the early studies lacked appropriate control groups and depended on “the limitations of retrospective parent-report methodology typical of the area” for data collection. In regards to the first-hand accounts, O’neil and Jones also point out that “a number of dangers are inherent in uncritically accepting these accounts at face value and in any wider generalization to the autistic population as a whole.” Still, some researchers, like Janet Kern, insist that more current research demonstrates that sensory processing dysfunction persist globally throughout autism and affects “all the main modalities and mulitsensory processing” systems. Others like Geraldine Dawson and Renee Watling contend that “sensory processing abnormalities are not universal or specific to autism, the prevalence of such abnormalities in autism is relatively high.” If sensory processing dysfunction is not universal to autism then it might be hard to advocate for sensory sensitive environments if they hinder generalization skill development, which appears to be a more universal difficultly for individuals on the autism spectrum.
