Visual tasks and postural sway in children with and without autism spectrum disorders.
Children with autism sway more, but they still tighten posture when a visual task gets harder, so balance is adaptable, not broken.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Chang et al. (2010) watched kids stand on a force plate while doing two visual jobs. One job was a simple picture look-over. The other was a tricky search task where kids had to find tiny targets.
All kids were 8-11 years old. Half had autism, half were typical. The team measured how much each child wobbled.
What they found
Kids with autism swayed more overall. Yet both groups cut sway when the search task got harder. The harder visual job actually steadied their bodies.
The result shows children with autism can still tune posture when vision is busy.
How this fits with other research
Gepner et al. (2002) seems to disagree. They saw autistic kids react less to fast moving walls. But that study used pure autistic kids, not the wider ASD group, and speed, not a search task. Different method, different outcome.
Ghanouni et al. (2017) later copied the sway test with social pictures. They also found extra wobble in autism, proving the pattern holds across picture types.
Martín-Díaz et al. (2026) pooled 34 studies and confirm the medium sway deficit. Their big review now includes the 2010 data you are reading.
Why it matters
Do not assume poor balance means poor control. These kids still adjust sway when vision is loaded. Use visual tasks like puzzles or hidden-picture games during standing practice. The game itself can act like a built-in stabilizer. Start with easy searches, then make them harder to keep the postural system engaged.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
We investigated the influences of two different suprapostural visual tasks, visual searching and visual inspection, on the postural sway of children with and without autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Sixteen ASD children (age=8.75±1.34 years; height=130.34±11.03 cm) were recruited from a local support group. Individuals with an intellectual disability as a co-occurring condition and those with severe behavior problems that required formal intervention were excluded. Twenty-two sex- and age-matched typically developing (TD) children (age=8.93±1.39 years; height=133.47±8.21 cm) were recruited from a local public elementary school. Postural sway was recorded using a magnetic tracking system (Flock of Birds, Ascension Technologies, Inc., Burlington, VT). Results indicated that the ASD children exhibited greater sway than the TD children. Despite this difference, both TD and ASD children showed reduced sway during the search task, relative to sway during the inspection task. These findings replicate those of Stoffregen et al. (2000), Stoffregen, Giveans, et al. (2009), Stoffregen, Villard, et al. (2009) and Prado et al. (2007) and extend them to TD children as well as ASD children. Both TD and ASD children were able to functionally modulate postural sway to facilitate the performance of a task that required higher perceptual effort.
Research in developmental disabilities, 2010 · doi:10.1016/j.ridd.2010.06.003