Simplicity helps autistic children follow instructions, deal with life

When Ethan Meeder doesn't follow directions at school, it's not because he's stubborn.

The 13-year-old seventh-grader from the Pittsburgh area has a brain that shuts down when he has to process too much at one time. For example, last spring Meeder's teacher gave him four commands, one right after the other. "He just melted down," says his mom, Cindy Meeder.

Ethan has an average I.Q., yet he has trouble with things that most of us take for granted, such as following directions. "He tests like he should be able to do these things, but he can't," Cindy Meeder says.

Ethan has autism, an incurable brain disorder that affects about 300,000 school-age children in the United States, according to Los Angeles-based Cure Autism Now.

Scientific studies out in July and August have helped increase scientists' understanding of how autism affects the brain. The studies fit with other research that suggests that autism is not limited to a few brain regions as once thought, but instead is a global disorder that affects reasoning, memory, balance, multitasking and other skills.

Simple instructions

In the past, scientists believed autism was confined to the brain areas that controlled social interaction, language and behavior. But the new findings indicate that autism affects many parts of the brain and possibly the wiring that connects one brain region to another.

While some kids with autism are mentally retarded, University of Pittsburgh researcher Nancy Minshew and colleagues studied 56 children with autism who had an I.Q. of at least 80, close to the average I.Q. of 100.

The Pittsburgh team gave the kids a battery of tests that assessed memory, attention and other skills. The team found that those with autism had no trouble with basic tasks. Many of these kids were proficient at spelling and had a good command of grammar, says co-author Diane Williams, who is also at the University of Pittsburgh.

But the study did find that kids with autism faltered when asked to do more complex tasks. So while they're good at details, they have trouble piecing words together to get the meaning of an entire paragraph or story. They also had difficulty understanding complex figures of speech such as idioms and metaphors. If you tell a child with autism to "hop to it," they might literally start to hop around the room, Minshew says.