Visual Effect on the Odor Identification Ability of Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder

Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) is considered as one of the developmental disorders caused by dysfunctions of the brain. It can be difficult for patient with ASD to communicate using words and gestures, and process the multiple stimuli. It is important to detect a person with ASD while young because there is a possibility that the symptoms can be improved significantly by appropriate treatment and education. However, there are many problems for diagnosing ASD because it requires a lot of preparations and it takes a long time to diagnose. In late years, researches have been focused on the olfaction of patients with ASD. In these researches, there are some significant differences in the detection ability between the children with ASD and control groups. To provide another determination from characteristics of ASD using olfaction, we conducted examinations of visual effect on the odor identification ability for the children with ASD and non-ASD. The experimental results show that children with ASD are more likely to mistake the odor identification than non-ASD when an odor was presented with a video. We expect that the knowledge which we obtain in this paper can be utilized as one of the index for screening ASD.