The neuroscience of autism education

Abstract

Over the last two decades there has been significant investment in identifying the etiology, brain basis and earliest manifestations of autism spectrum disorders (ASDs). Nevertheless, the current mainstay of treatment for most individuals is appropriate educational provision, sometimes supplemented by targeted behavioral interventions. Indeed, no matter how rapid the progress in understanding the basic neurobiology of ASDs, for the foreseeable future education is likely to remain the most widely available intervention. Yet, despite education's central role, very little is known about the neuroscience of current approaches and there have been few attempts to use insights from neuroscience to optimize educational strategies. In large part this situation arises from the relatively limited interactions that have occurred between autism educationalists and autism neuroscientists, which is symptomatic of a more general lack of interest in the neuroscience of education. But recent awareness of this gap in knowledge has led to new academic posts in the neuroscience of education: a development which should be used to understand and improve education for individuals with ASD. What are the issues that different groups of professionals will need to address jointly? A pivotal question for any intervention is to understand what cognitive mechanism an individual is currently using to try to achieve a particular goal. Of course, no one approach can completely answer that question, but functional brain imaging can probably show when individuals are using different-from-usual mechanisms. Indeed, overall the literature seems to indicate that unusual cognitive strategies are more common than most researchers had previously supposed. A related issue is how an intervention should be targeted to improve ability in an area of functioning: should the focus be on teaching the development of the usual mechanisms or should the goal be to foster existing mechanisms, even if they are unusual? Although the question seems simple, it is often not considered overtly and the answer may differ according to the domain of functioning. Moreover, there may be considerable differences between individuals in their learning strategies. Finally, clinical experience indicates that some individuals with ASD can continue to gain significantly new skills well beyond early adult life. The corollary is that optimizing education across the life span will require identification of learning mechanisms at different times during development. The initial focus of any new initiative will probably be on investigating learning mechanisms in able individuals with ASD, who are more likely to cooperate with physiological and imaging techniques. Also there is considerable advantage in initially focussing on those domains of learning about which most is known about underlying mechanisms in typical development. But there are also some important questions that cross learning domains. For instance, the difficulty in achieving generalization of skills has challenged the educationalists for generations and probably indicates that the mechanisms of skill learning are unusual. Also, it is unclear whether in individuals with ASD, skill learning follows the usual trajectory of becoming increasingly automatic or indeed whether some skills never achieve that status. Conditions such as ASD, and other neurodevelopmental disorders, can give insights into neurobiological mechanisms that would not normally be revealed by the study of typical development alone. Moreover, the long-term goal of identifying susceptibility genes for ASDs means that ultimately we may be able to make tentative links between fundamental biochemical and neurodevelopmental processes and some learning mechanisms. It is premature to talk of “Educationogenomics”, but we should not underestimate the potential for neuroscience to improve educational practices, which have remained unchanged for millennia.