Visual Perceptual Skills
Visual Perceptual Skills
Motor skills
- The ability to interpret and assign meaning to what is seen
- A cognitive and visual skill
- 7 areas of visual perception
- Fine and gross motor skills
- Formal (standardized) and informal testing
- In context of functional task performance -
Questions we ask -
- Can they sit up straight (core strength)?
- Are they symmetrical in their posture?
- Are they using hand and wrist to write?
- Do they have shoulder stability?
- What is their pencil grip like?
Visual motor skills
The Occupational Therapy Assessment
- Most classroom "doing" tasks are visual motor skills
- Is the ability to translate a visual image into an accurate motor response
- Is reliant on motor skills and visual perceptual skills
What is Occupational Therapy?
- Assisting every child to meet their potential
- Fulfil their roles or "occupations" within the school setting
- Functional versus Sensory
Visual Perceptual Sub-Areas
Visual Perceptual sub areas
Visual Spatial Relations
- Understanding the relationship of an object within it's environment
- What does this look like?
- difficulty planning movements around the classroom
- difficulty with spatial concepts
- reversals
- difficulty reading maps, graphs, charts
- poor recall of left and right
- difficulty finding things
Sequential memory
- Ability to remember a sequence of objects or forms in the correct order
- What does this look like?
- difficulty sequencing letters in a word or words in a sentence
- difficulty recalling the sequence of alphabet
- difficulty copying from one source to another
- poor spelling
- poor recall of order of events after reading
Visual discrimination
- Ability to see differences and similarities in objects.
- What does this look like?
- difficulty seeing and correcting errors
- difficulties with dressing
- difficulties seeing similarities in letter formations
form constancy
- Ability to see a form and recognise it, even though it may be turned around or a different size.
- What does this look like?
- difficulty reading different fonts
- slower to master numbers and letters
- difficulty seeing errors
- reversals
- difficulty transitioning from print to cursive
visual memory
- Ability to store and recall visual details of an object or form.
- What does this look like?
- difficulty reproducing letters or numbers
- mixing upper and lower case letters
- poor reading comprehension
- difficulty remembering sight words
- can influence long term memory
visual closure
- Recognising a form or object when a part is missing
- What does this look like?
- poor writing ability
- difficulty working from poor photocopies/print material
- poor spelling
- difficulty with mazes, dot to dot and wordsearch type tasks
figure-ground
- Ability to find something in a busy background
- What does this look like?
- difficulty in attending to one part of the page and blocking out the rest
- difficulty filtering out distractions in environment
- poor organisation skills
- over attends to big picture and misses detail OR attends to detail and misses big picture
- difficulty copying from another source
- poor visual searching skills
- difficulty finding things (including friends in a busy playground)
What does Visual Perceptual challenge look like in the classroom?
classroom Presentation
Skill Level
Difficulty with -
- puzzles or dot to dots
- spatial concepts
- differentiating between "b, d, p, q;"
- reversals
- loses place on a page when reading or writing.
- remembering left and right.
- forgets where to start
- remembering the alphabet in sequence
- copying from one place to another
- remembering sight words.
- completing partially drawn pictures or stencils
- attending to a word on a printed
- filtering out visual distractions
- hidden picture activities or finding a specific item in a cluttered desk.
BIG Picture
- Academic performance
- Attention
- Self-regulation
- Behaviour
- Organisation
big picture
what can you do?
what can you do?
Play
play
- Hidden picture games - such as ‘Where’s Wally?’
- Dot to dot
- Mazes
- Jigsaw puzzles
- Memory pairs
- Construction tasks - such as following instruction cards to build Lego
- Word Search and Crossword puzzles
- Bingo
compensatory strategies
- Giving visual cues
- Consider other senses when learning
- Specialised paper
- Copying from paper on desk
- Alphabet strips
- De-clutter
- Position desk away from distractions
- Keep worksheets clear and simple
- Eliminate visual distractions in the room
- Break tasks down
- Cover a worksheet with a blank page
- Use highlighters
- Use verbal reminders and prompts
- Augment using voice-to-text software