What you might notice

Sensory integration difficulties may be evident in the child or young person's behaviour.

Some individuals may experience the sensory inputs as overwhelming and upsetting, leading to ‘sensory overload’. Individuals may be oversensitive to sensory input, undersensitive, or both.

It’s common for all of us to occasionally feel under or oversensitive to sensory inputs. For example:

• Music or bright lights may feel too much if you have a headache.
• You can feel uncoordinated or find it hard to focus if you are tired.

But these feelings are temporary and wouldn't normally affect your day-to-day functioning in the long term.

Sensory integration or sensory processing difficulties are long term and have a big impact on everyday life and learning. However with professional advice and, if appropriate, therapy, much can be done to support a child or young person's daily functioning.

Some individuals may have difficulty processing input from one particular sense, whereas other individuals may experience difficulty integrating inputs from more than one sensory system.

Note that sensory integration difficulties are different from sensory impairments such as hearing loss, although sometimes the two result in similar behaviours. For example, an individual with perfect hearing can find it difficult to follow conversations if they have difficulties processing the incoming auditory signals.

Sensory modulation problems

Problems with sensory modulation occur when our brain either over responds to, or under responds to sensory information.

For example:

• If someone over responds to touch they may be very aware of the label in the back of their clothes.
• If someone is under-responsive to touch they may not notice someone tapping them on the shoulder.

It has been found that people can be over-responsive or under-responsive in all the different senses, they can be over-responsive in one sense and under-responsive in another.

For some people, they can be over-responsive and under-responsive in the same sense. Responsiveness can be dependent on a situation. For example, a stressful situation can make us more and sometimes less aware of sensations.

Praxis problems

Praxis is the medical term for how our brain plans for and carries out movements we have not done before.

For children this could be learning to jump; for adults, it may be learning to drive or use chopsticks. 

When sensory information is not properly processed it can make new movements very difficult, because the child does not have the ability to make sense of the different incoming sensory information. So, they struggle to work out where their body is and how much force, speed and direction is needed to do a new movement.

We call difficulties with praxis dyspraxia or developmental coordination disorder.