Visual Perception
Visual perception is the ability or skill to interpret and figure out what your eye sees. How clearly you see something from different distances is called visual acuity. Acuity issues can often be corrected with glasses to get back to 20/20 vision. However, even if your visual acuity is normal you can still have visual perceptual issues. Visual perceptual issues can be present from birth or start due to a neurological event like a stroke or traumatic brain injury.
Visual perceptual issues can present as problems with:
- Completing puzzles
- Finding objects/people when there is visual clutter around (i.e. finding a person in a crowd)
- Planning action/movement based on other objects (i.e. parallel parking, braking a car)
- Ordering/sequencing objects, numbers, letters
- Sorting and organizing
- Remembering the images you have seen
- Losing your place on a page when reading
- Recognizing a whole image when you can only see part of it (i.e sign, word, etc.)
These problems represent the many parts to visual perception including visual memory, closure, sequencing, and discrimination. To improve these specific parts and your visual perceptual skills as a whole try:
- Jig-saw puzzles
- Find the Difference games/pictures
- I-Spy games
- Hidden word/picture worksheets
- Using manipulatives like Lego or blocks to copy constructional building shapes from a model with
- Focusing and analyzing individual sections of visuals/pictures, Learn to break them into smaller parts
- Using a “word window” or reading strip to block out unnecessary print when reading
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