Visual Sensory Processing

Visual processing difficulties can manifest in many different ways.  Your child may exhibit visual defensiveness where he/she covers their eyes to bright light.  There may be various processing difficulties that make reading or other activities more difficult.  Finding things in competing backgrounds may make your child become overly frustrated and angry indicating difficulties with visual perceptual abilities.  All of these are examples of difficulties seen with visual processing.

Though there may be many different difficulties associated with visual processing, there are also different treatment approaches for each difficulty.  These may be carried out by your occupational therapist or referred to a visual specialist.

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Cognitive and perceptual therapy:

Areas a Pediatric Occupational Therapist treats:

• Visual discrimination - finding the similarities & differences
• Visual spatial relationships - being able to identify reversals of objects & symbols
• Visual sequential memory - to recall a shape from 4 choices after 4-5 seconds
• Visual memory - identifying a shape that has been memorized from the previous page
• Visual form constancy - finding the same shape when it is resized or rotated
• Visual figure ground - finding an object within a busy background
  

What to look out for in your child:
- Inattention and distractibility to written and or reading tasks
- Difficulty in letter recognition and letter reproduction
- Reversal of letters such as b for d or p for q
- Difficulty copying from a blackboard or a whiteboard
- Poor orientation of puzzle pieces - "gives up"
- Poor at following instructions Cognitive and Perceptual