Visual processing skills impact the ability to learn. Your child can have 20/20 vision and still have problems with visual perceptual processing.

What is visual perceptual processing?

These are the skills that a child uses to make sense of what he or she sees. When the eyes send visual information to the brain, it needs to understand what it sees and make sense of it.

This is not to be confused with visual acuity, or how well a child sees.

Around three months of age, your baby’s fuzzy eyesight has grown clear enough for her to focus and follow objects with her eyes. You will see her frequently staring at objects within her field of vision. Her eyes are beginning to distinguish between colors, patterns, and shapes.

Visual perception needs correct eye development, as well as cognitive development to build visual connections from memories.

Why Are Visual Processing Skills Important?

Good visual processing skills are needed for reading, writing, spelling, handwriting, drawing, and mathematics. Some of the difficulties a child with weak visual processing skills will exhibit include trouble working with puzzles, copying block designs, copying from the board, visualizing objects, or discriminating shapes or letters. She may even have trouble integrating visual information with other senses to ride a bike or catch a ball.

Your child’s thinking process becomes easier as her ability to perceive information around her increases.

While visual processing issues are not recognized as a learning disability, many children characterized with learning challenges, including those with dyslexia, have poor visual processing skills.

What Are Visual Processing Skills?

These skills are subdivided into categories which include:

• Visual Form Constancy – This skill helps a child realize that a letter remains the same no matter what font it is printed in, or if it is written in different places.
• Visual Discrimination – This is the ability to detect differences in visual images and helps your child develop reading and writing fluency.
• Visual Figure-Ground Perception – This is the ability to distinguish an object from its background, and helps with reading skills.
• Visual Closure – This is the ability to visualize the complete whole when given incomplete information and is important for reading fluency.
• Visual Memory – This skill allows the child to immediately recall the characteristics of a form, for example a sight word from one page to the next or copy from the board to her paper.
• Visual Sequential-Memory – This is the ability to remember listed items in the correct order; a skill that is essential for both spelling and reading.
• Visual Spatial Relationships – This skill allows the child to understand the relationships of objects within the environment.
• Visual Motor Integration – This is the ability to combine visual perceptual and fine motor skills, and is vital for good handwriting.

What Are Some Signs of Visual Processing Problems?

• Reverses or misreads letters, numbers, or words
• Clumsy or bumps into things
• Has difficulty writing within lines
• Can’t remember phone numbers
• Skips words or entire lines when reading, or reads the same sentence over
• Complains of eye strain, or frequently rubs eyes
• Confuses math symbols or omits steps
• Difficulty remembering what letters or objects look like
• Trouble copying from the whiteboard to paper
• Difficulty with concepts such as “up”, “down”, “left”, “right”, “above”
• Confuses capital and lower case letters
• Tends to dislike or avoid reading
• Trouble finding a pencil in a messy desk
• Slow reading speed
• Eyes water when reading, on a computer, or video game
• Poor written work
• Less ability to observe and react to facial expressions
• Unable to recognize the same word from sentence to sentence

How Can You Help Your Child?

• Hidden pictures games in books such as “Where’s Wally”.
• Picture drawing: Practice completing partially drawn pictures.
• Dot-to-dot worksheets or puzzles.
• Review work: Encourage your child to identify mistakes in written material.
• Memory games: Playing games such as Memory.
• Sensory activities: Use bendable things such as pipe cleaners to form letters and shapes (because feeling a shape can help them visualize the shape). The letters can then be glued onto index cards, and later the child can touch them to “feel” the shape of the letter.
• Construction-type activities such as Duplo, Lego or other building blocks.
• Flash cards with a correct letter on one side and an incorrectly formed letter on the other side. Have the child try to draw the letter correctly, then turn over the card to see if it is right. (Have them write in sand or with finger paint to make it more fun).
• Word search puzzles that require you to look for a series of letter.
• Copy 3-D block designs
• Identify objects by touch: Place plastic letters into a bag, and have the child identify the letter by “feel”.

While your child’s annual examination may tell you that she sees with clarity, more than that is needed when it comes to learning and visual processing. For many children with learning challenges, the trouble is connected with their poorly developed visual perceptual processing abilities.

What visual processing challenges did you face as a child?