26/10/2026
New Research: Opening the Black Box of Ayres Sensory Integration®
A fascinating new paper by Stacey Reynolds, Lauren Andelin and Caterina LaRocca (2026) explores an important question: How does Ayres Sensory Integration® (ASI) intervention bring about change, and how might those changes support meaningful participation in everyday life?
The authors explore the distinction between treatment theory, which explains how intervention is expected to influence sensory and sensorimotor capacities, and enablement theory, which considers how changes in these capacities interact with personal, environmental and occupational factors to support participation.
Drawing on contemporary rehabilitation science, the paper highlights the importance of making our clinical reasoning more explicit. What are the active ingredients of intervention? What changes are we hoping to support? What neurological mechanisms might explain those changes? And how might they contribute to participation in everyday activities?
The authors also explore how this thinking can be integrated with Data-Driven Decision Making (DDDM), without abandoning existing occupational therapy frameworks.
Through practical examples, including family participation, caregiver coaching and multidisciplinary working, the paper illustrates how different interventions and contextual factors may contribute to shared participation goals.
Importantly, the authors acknowledge that many of the proposed neurological mechanisms underlying ASI remain hypotheses requiring further investigation.
This is a conceptual paper rather than a new intervention study, offering a valuable contribution to ongoing discussions about clinical reasoning, research quality, intervention fidelity and how we understand and evaluate change.
An interesting read for occupational therapists, researchers, educators and everyone interested in the evolving science of sensory integration.
Reynolds, S., Andelin, L. & LaRocca, C. (2026). Opening the Black Box of Ayres Sensory Integration®: Clarifying Mechanisms of Change from Treatment Theory to Participation.
Published 20 October 2026 in Brain Sciences.
🔗 Read the full open-access paper:
https://doi.org/10.3390/brainsci16101131
