Visual Perception

Who says VT is all about fun and games?   Well, it's not ALL about fun and games but . . . sometimes we are forced to play games.  We admit - it's hard work, it's medically necessary and we give people a lot of very obvious new skills but one area that we are very proud of is our visual perceptual skills training.  Here is some information about visual perception and why it is so important.

Visual perception is an active process that allows information that has been extracted from the environment to be organized and understood.  Being able to see, understand and manipulate or take appropriate action is critical for optimal processing and learning. The following visual cognitive skills are necessary for this process to be efficient:

Visual Discrimination is the ability to visually discriminate similarities and differences. An individual with a visual discrimination weakness is not able to match and/or distinguish similarities and differences in words, letters, pictures, objects, etc. Difficulties may be experienced in reading, writing and spelling. They may also exhibit excessive tactile behavior, having to touch everything to understand it.

Visual Spatial Relationships describes the ability to perceive the position of two or more objects in relation to oneself and in relation to each other. One who demonstrates poor visual spatial relationships may find it difficult to put letters in the proper sequence while reading or spelling, leave enough room at the end of a line for the entire word, or have trouble with sequential tasks. For example, he might read the word “string” as “stiring” or spell it “sitnrg”. He may be unable to remember the sequence of processes involved with solving problems.

Visual form constancy is the ability to recognize the fundamental elements of a form, and identify them when they are presented in variations such as smaller, larger, rotated, reversed, fancier, bolder, colored or hidden within other designs, etc. An individual with adequate perceptual constancy will recognize an object, word, letter, or number, no matter how it is presented (a word, letter, or number even if it appears in a different font, a word if it is printed in all capital letters, or a number in an unfamiliar context.) An individual with poorly developed visual form constancy is not only likely to feel anxious about the general unreliability of her visual world, but may also experience difficulties in academic learning.  Although she may learn to recognize a number, letter, or word when she sees it in a particular script or context, she may be quite unable to recognize the same symbol when it is presented in a different manner. Such an individual is constantly deceived by her senses. A word she knows well in one form, color, size, type of writing or in conjunction with certain other words may appear new to her when presented in another form, color, size, or context. For a child with such a weakness, learning to read or to work with symbols is very difficult.

Visual closure is the ability to identify figures when they are incomplete or only fragments of the figure are visible. An individual with poor visual closure has difficulty mentally “filling in” partially complete visual information. For example, visualizing the missing parts of a poorly photocopied page of print or pictures, or recognizing an object when it is partially hidden by other objects in front of it.  This includes visualization.

Visual figure ground is the ability to distinguish and object from its background. An individual with figure ground weakness will have difficulty picking out and focusing attention on a specific object or detail of an object from surrounding objects, for example, identifying a particular word in a paragraph.

Visual memory is the ability to remember what we have seen. An individual with visual memory problems may have difficulty remembering the alphabet, learning basic math facts, reading and spelling sight words (words unable to be spelled phonetically – i.e. would, boar, laugh, two/too).

Visual sequential memory is the ability to remember a series of visual data in specific order of presentation. A visual sequential memory deficit can reflect the inability to correctly remember symbols, and/or sequences of symbols previously seen. Such a deficit can frequently cause difficulty identifying words which have similar sequences, leading to confusion. The individual who does not read well is frequently the one who cannot visualize events in sequence. She may word-call, but visual sequential memory problems may hinder comprehension.

Visual motor integration is the ability to accurately analyze and interpret visually presented information to plan appropriate motor action and take in motor information to visualize the movement or action. Deficiencies can manifest in poor handwriting, drawing and sports performance as well as poor ability to learn from motor experience.

Auditory-visual integration is the ability match a temporally distributed auditory stimulus to a spatially distributed visual response. Good inter-sensory temporal-spatial integration as well as adequate auditory memory and visual efficiency are necessary. Adequate visual auditory integration is necessary for interpretation of punctuation clues in reading as well as interpretation of written music.