Characteristics of Sensory Integration

Sensory integration is how people take in and deal with information coming into their bodies through their senses. Humans are constantly barraged with a flow of information from the senses. This includes everything they see, hear, taste, touch and smell. Sensory integration is how people interpret and understand their environment. This is imperative to basic survival in day-to-day life.

Somatosensory: Movement

• The tactile system, response to touch and touching, is the first sensory system to develop in humans. Perceiving touch and the ability to discriminate touch develop as an infant grows. People perceive touch when something touches the skin and receptors tell the brain that touch is occurring. This allows people to know where their bodies end and begin. The human body perceives two types of touch: light and pressure. Proprioception involves perceiving the movements of joints and limbs as well as understanding their position in a person's environment. Proprioception controls the understanding of speed, grasping, lifting, timing of movements and force needed to move muscles. The vestibular apparatus causes humans to challenge gravity through running, swinging and jumping. These sensations are perceived by the inner ear. It tells the brain that a person is moving, on something moving or watching something moving. This apparatus also tells which direction is down, as the vestibular apparatus is tied to gravity.

Auditory Processes

• This is the system that registers responses to things people hear. The integration of auditory processes as part of the sensory system includes attending to various sounds, remembering sounds, knowing where a sound originated, repeating sounds heard, awareness of rhythms, isolating specific sounds from various sounds, making meaning from verbal sounds, combining stimuli from two ears into one impression and identifying position of sounds in words. This is the main mode of learning in early childhood.

Visual Processes

• The visual system is how the body perceives things it sees. This is how a person understands relationships between other people as well as people and other animals and objects. The visual system helps a person understand where he is in space by perceiving edges, contrast and movement. The brain must coordinate with the limbs to conduct fine motor activities like writing. This eye-hand coordination is paramount for humans to interact with their environments and made incredibly difficult if vision is impaired.

Problems Integrating Sensory Information

• If someone is hyper-responsive to sensory stimuli, he has trouble regulating all of the sensory information inundating his system. He will find things overwhelming and perceive that he is being attacked by information. If someone is hypo-responsive to sensory stimuli, she is craving sensory input and will do whatever it takes to gain it. This type of sensory integration issue is particularly dangerous because a person can hurt herself and be unaware of it.

  Hyperarousal is paying too much attention to stimuli that most people perceive as background information; for example, the hum of fluorescent lights or the smell of someone's shampoo. A hyperaroused person will avoid touching and allowing others to touch him. Many textures can be aversive. For example, tags in clothing, shaving cream, mud and sandpaper can make people with tactile defensiveness want to crawl out of their skins.

  Executive function is a person's ability to plan out actions. You tell yourself to throw a ball and your body picks up the ball, your arm bends and you move quickly to launch the ball. A person with a sensory integration disorder has problems planning all of this out. She will have trouble following directions even if she has been able to complete the same exact task before. Her mind is wired differently. It is as if she was traveling and needed to make a connecting flight; sometimes she is able to race across the airport just fine and other times she is stuck trying to figure out which terminal and gate she needs to reach.