Fig. 1: How sensory gating disrupts infant sensory inputs to the developing CNS.
From: Infant sensory gating and a developmental cascade to autistic traits and anxiety
An infant’s sensory environment simultaneously contains both irrelevant stimuli, like background noises, and important social cues that promote social interaction and learning. Impaired sensory gating produces excessive processing of irrelevant stimuli, which may: (1) cause the infant to experience repeated, context-inappropriate sensory distress and (2) compete with infants’ processing of dynamic social cues, reducing infant looking at and attention to these important stimuli.
