Maze Therapy Theory and the Autistic Child
Your theory is crazy, but it's not crazy enough to be true.
Niels Bohr (1885-1962), to a young physicist
Autism is a terrible affliction affecting millions of children and adults across the globe. Although symptoms range from mild social, language, and sensory development delays to almost complete functional impairment, at some point almost all autistic children suffer from extreme difficulty in expressive and receptive language skills. In order to improve these language deficiencies, many parents, teachers, and speech therapists turn to ABA, or "Applied Behavioral Analysis." Although ABA is somewhat affective, it does not utilize the single most common "positive" trait in most autistic children, their spatial/visual memory.
Talk to any mother of an autistic child, and, almost without exception, you will find that their children exhibit exceptional spatial/visual memory -- demonstrated in their, often, uncanny sense of directional/place memory. For...
One way to capitalize on this strength is to incorporate it into the language/behavior learning process using a maze.
Traditional speech/ABA sessions involve a therapist sitting at a table, drilling the child on language/social concepts -- often involving pictures, flash cards, and physical prompting. For example, the therapist may attempt to teach the child to respond to something as simple as "What is your name?" Unfortunately, for many autistic children, it can take several weeks, months, or even years for them to master even such a seemingly simple exchange. However, by incorporating the spatial/locational/visual memory area of the brain into the therapy, it can reduce this time period significantly…
