Visual Perception and Visual Motor Skills in Pediatric OT
Binocular vision is the ability to maintain visual focus on an object with both eyes, creating a single visual image. Visual challenges can exist even when visual acuity is normal. These challenges may impact the clarity of binocular vision, visual efficiency, learning ability and motor skills. The ability to team two eyes together and process information from both eyes simultaneously is important for true depth perception and comfortable, clear vision at all distances. Binocular vision aids in the development of fine motor skills. The visual system guides the motor system by providing the brain a clear, single image when distance and spatial information is correct. Poor binocular vision abilities can cause mis-judgement of the distance of objects and aid in fine motor and eye coordination difficulties as well as blurred, fluctuating vision, and decreased graphomotor skills. Two important skills of vision include visual perception and visual motor abilities.
Visual perception refers to the meaning that our brains give to the information that we see. Visual perception allows us to make sense out of what we see. Good visual perception is needed to read, write, manipulate items, use scissors and draw. We also need visual perception to keep from bumping into things, to direct a ball toward a target, to form letters among other vital skills. Eye hand coordination is also a part of visual perception. We need this skill to coordinate the actions we use to tie our shoes, hit a target, catch or throw a ball, and thread a bead on a string. Visual perception is made up of a complex combination of various skills. Visual perceptual skills include visual memory, visual closure, form constancy, visual spatial relations, visual discrimination, visual attention, visual sequential memory, and visual figure ground.
Visual memory: The ability to take in a visual stimulus, retain its details, and store for later retrieval.
Visual closure: The ability to accurately identify objects that are partially covered or missing.
Form constancy: The ability to identify objects despite their variation of size, color, shape, position, or texture.
Visual spatial relations: The ability to perceive relationships of objects position in space
Visual discrimination: The ability to detect differences in and ability to classify objects, symbols, or shapes.
Visual attention: The ability to select relevant information and filter out irrelevant information from cluttered visual scenes.
Visual sequential memory: The ability to remember and recall a sequence of objects and/or events in the correct order
Visual figure ground: The ability to distinguish foreground from background.
Visual motor skills are essential to coordinated and efficient use of the hands and eyes. Visual motor skills enable an individual to process information around them. The ability to observe, recognize, and use visual information about forms, shapes, figures, and objects makes up our visual motor abilities. Visual motor skills include a coordination of visual information that is perceived and processed with motor skills, including fine motor, gross motor, and sensory motor. Visual motor skills (and visual motor integration) are needed for coordinating the hands, legs, and the rest of the body’s movements with what the eyes perceive.
Resources:
https://www.theottoolbox.com/visual-motor-skills/
http://www.zoemailloux.com/uploads/1/6/0/8/16088620/visual_perception-what_do_we_see_through_the_minds_eye.pdf
Written by Kelsey Conlon MS, OTR/L