3. INTEGRATION DISABILITIES

Once the information coming into the brain is registered, it has to be understood. At least two steps are required to do this: sequencing and abstraction.

Suppose that your brain recorded the following three graphic symbols: d, o, g. No problems with visual perception. But to make sense of the perception, you have to place the symbols in the right order, or sequence. Is it d-o-g, or g-o-d or d-g-o, or what? Then you have to infer meaning from the context in which the word is used, both a general meaning and a specific meaning. For example, "the dog" and "your dog" have very different meanings. The ability to draw general applications from specific words and to attach subtle shading to the basic meanings of words is referred to as "abstract thinking."

The process of integrating input, of understanding what your brain has recorded, thus requires both sequencing and abstraction. Your child might have a disability in one area or the other, or both. A child who has difficulty sequencing what comes in from the eyes is said to have a visual sequencing disability. So, too, the child might have difficulty with visual abstraction or auditory abstraction.

Sequencing Disabilities
A child with such a disability might hear or read a story, but in recounting it, start in the middle, go to the beginning, then shift to the end. Eventually the whole story comes out, but the sequence of events is wrong.

Or a child might see the math problem as

16 - 3 =? on the blackboard, but write it as 61 - 3 = ? Or a child might see

2 + 3 = ? and write 2 + 5 = 3. The child knows the right answer but gets the sequence wrong. Spelling words with all of the right letters in the wrong order can also reflect this disability.

Or a child may memorize a sequence--the days of the week, for example--and then be unable to use single units out of the sequence correctly. If you ask what comes after Wednesday, the child cannot answer spontaneously, but must go back over the whole list, "Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday ...," before she or he can answer. A child with a sequence disability might hit the baseball then run to third rather than first base or have difficulty with board games that require moving in a particular sequence. Or when setting the dinner table, he or she might have trouble placing each item in the proper place.

Abstraction Disabilities
Once information is recorded in the brain and laced in the right sequence, one must be able to infer meaning. Most learning disabled children have only minor difficulties in this area. Abstraction--the ability to derive the correct general meaning from a particular word or symbol--is a very basic intellectual task. If the disability in this area is too great, the child is apt to be functioning at a retarded level.

Some children do, however, have problems with abstraction. The teacher may be doing a language-arts exercise with a group of second graders. He or she reads a story about a police officer, let us say. The teacher then begins a discussion of police officers in general, asking the pupils if they know any men or women who are police officers in their neighborhoods, and if so, what do they do? A child with an abstraction disability may not be able to answer such a question. He or she can only talk about the particular officer in the story and not about law officers in general. Older children might have difficulty understanding jokes. Much of humor is based on a play on words which confuses them.

Short-term memory is the process by which you hold on to information as long as you are concentrating on it. For example, when you call the information operator for a long-distance number, you get a ten-digit number with an area code. Like most people, you can probably retain these numbers long enough to dial the number if you do it right away and nothing interrupts your attention. However, if someone starts talking to you in the course of dialing, you may lose the number. Or, you might go to the store with five things in mind to buy, but by the time you get there so many different impressions have intervened that you've forgotten an item or two on your list.

Long-term memory refers to the process by which you store information that you have repeated often enough. You can retrieve this information quickly by thinking of it--you can come up with your current address and phone number quite readily, for example--or you may have to spend a little more time and effort to think or it--your mother's home address, for example.

If your child has a memory disability, it is most likely a short-term one. Like abstraction disabilities, long-term memory disabilities interferes so much with functioning that children who have them are more likely to be classified as retarded. It may take ten to fifteen repetitions for a child with this problem to retain what the average child retains in three or five repetitions. Yet the same child usually has no problem with long-term memory. Your child probably surprises you at times by coming up with details that you have forgotten about, something that happened several years ago.

A short-term memory disability can occur with information learned through what one sees--visual short-term memory disability--or with information learned through what one hears--auditory short-term memory disability. Often the two are combined. For example, you might go over a spelling list one evening with your son. He looks at it several times, listens to you, and can write down the spellings correctly from memory. He seems to have it down pat, but that's because he's concentrating on it. The next morning he has lost most or all of the words. Or a teacher may go over a math concept in class until your daughter understands it--she's concentrating on it. Yet when she comes home that night and does her homework, she has completely forgotten how to do the problems.