Question re: eye gaze and reflexes

February 5, 2011

Hi - I'm , mom of a 9 year old high functioning boy on the autism spectrum.

My son has been doing RDI for 5 years, HANDLE for 2, and has had an MNRI home

program now since September 2010. He has made a lot of progress due to the

MNRI, but that's a subject for another post!

My autism consultant and I just recently realized that my son really doesn't

quite " get " that a person's eye gaze is communication, that it is telling him

something about what the other person might be thinking. This was easy for us to

overlook in him, because he's highly verbal (!) and has pretty good eye contact,

is very social, and has come a long way in using and understanding gestures etc.

But, for example, if I'm talking to him and suddenly shift my gaze behind him or

somewhere else, he really doesn't notice (unless I make a sound). For example,

if I were looking at a co-worker and suddenly shifted to looking to his side and

behind he, he'd probably say " What are you looking at? " or he might look there

himself to see what I was looking at.

We just recently started on ATNR and the early, sort of " preliminary " STNR

work, working on the neck flexors and some visual tracking (for short periods,

this is really hard for him because his eyes don't work well together). I've

read that the STNR and ATNR are influential in how a child develops binaural and

binocular abilities, can orient toward stimuli, etc.

My question is: how might retained or dysfunctional reflexes affect a person's

ability to understand the MEANING of another person's eye gaze shifts? Could I

expect my son to better be able to understand that other peoples' eyes are

communicating as we continue working on the ATNR and STNR reflexes?

Sorry to be so rambling, I've been struggling with how to ask this question for

awhile! Blessings to you all,

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