Visual Processing Skills

Visual Processing Skills are what our brain uses to make sense of what we see in the world around us.
A child who has not developed good eye movement, eye teaming, and eye focusing skills will often have more difficulty with visual processing skills

It is broken up into several areas:

Visual discrimination is the ability of a person to be aware of the distinctive features of forms including shape, orientation, size, and color. Visual discrimination, figure ground, and closure problems may result in a person confusing words/letters/numbers with similar beginnings or endings and even entire words. Discriminating between size of letters and objects.
 Matching two dimensions to three dimension such as alphabet letters

Visual Spatial Relations: The ability to determine that one form or part of a form is turned in a different direction than the others
Visual spatial skills refer to the ability to understand directional concepts that organize a person’s body in space. These skills allow an individual to develop spatial concepts, such as right and left, front and back, and up and down as they relate to their body and to objects in space. A visual spatial deficit may contribute to poor athletic performance, difficulties with rhythmic activities, lack of coordination and balance, clumsiness, reversals of forms and letters, such as ‘b’ and ‘d’ and words such as ‘on’ and ‘no’ and ‘was’ and ‘saw,’ and a tendency to work with one side of body while the other side does not participate. Typically we will see issues with bilateral coordination, crossing midline and establish hand dominance.
Can cause problems with:
-difficult for the child to plan actions in relation to objects around him/her
-difficulty with spatial concepts such as "in, out, on, under, next to, up, down, in front of"
-difficulty differentiating "b, d, p, q"
-leads to poor sight vocabulary
-difficulty reading charts, maps and diagrams
-results in inconsistent symbol reversals and transposing numbers and letters
-losing place on a page
-difficulty finding what is being looked for
-attending to a task
-remembering left and right
-math computations if more than one digit
​-forgets where to start reading

Visual figure ground is the ability to distinguish an object from irrelevant background information. Being able to filter out what is relevant visual information.  The ability to perceive a form and find it hidden in a background with visual noise.
-child may have difficulty attending to a word on a printed page due to his/her inability to block out other words around it
-difficulty filtering out visual distractions such as colorful bulletin boards or movement in a room in order to attend to a task at hand
-difficulty sorting and organizing personal belonging
-over attend to detail and miss the big picture
-overlooks details and misses important information (word recognition, locating one object within a group, finding place on a page or skips pages and sections, noticing punctuation)
-difficulty copying from the board and omits word/words
-difficulty recognizing misformed letters and uneven spacing, 
-difficulty with hiddem picture activities
-difficulty locating a friend in a crowded room or playground or finding a specific item in a cluttered desk
-issues with figure ground also impacts attention/focus, which greatly interferes with academic work

Visual closure is the ability to recognize a complete feature from fragmented information. Understanding parts to whole. (math concepts)
-can impact ability to write
-use worksheets or test forms that are poorly photocopied
-complete partially draw pictures or stencils
-spelling
-difficulty with completing assignments
-difficulty with connect the dots
-math is challenging
-child tends to leave out parts of the words or words within a sentence.

Visual memory is the ability to retain/store information over an adequate period of time. The storing the maximum information in the shortest possible time provides for optimal performance and is essential for reading comprehension and spelling. Dysfunctions in visual memory may cause difficulty in copying assignments in a timely manner, difficulty recognizing the same word on the next page, and difficulty retaining what is seen or heard. Spelling difficulties are typically noted.
-may have problems reproducing figures (letters, numbers, shapes or symbols)
-difficulty copying from the board or from text
-replicating information on worksheets
-difficulty with reading comprehension
-recalling a phone number, sight words
-recalling what was read
 
Visual sequential memory is the ability to perceive and remember a sequence of objects, letters, words, and other symbols in the same order as originally seen.
-difficulty sequencing letters or numbers in word or math problems
-recalling alphabet in sequence
-copy from one place to another
-perform math
-retrieve words with reversals or when out of order
-recall events after reading
-child tends to forget assignments and steps that are shown in an activity

Visual form constancy is the ability to recognize objects as they change size, shape, or orientation (turned upside down or backwards).
-makes reading difficult as child may not recognize familiar letters when presented in different colors, fonts, sizes)
-masters alphabet and numbers at a slower rate
-"p,d"q,b"- confusion
difficulty understanding volumetric concepts mass, amount and quantity