NECESSARY VISION SKILLS
WE HAVE TO DO A LOT MORE THAN JUST OPEN OUR EYES TO TRULY SEE THE WORLD!
Many people think seeing well only involves having 20/20 vision, but that is just one of MANY visual skills we need to effectively learn, read, pay attention, and live our lives. Vision is our dominant system for learning. No one is born with these vision skills, we learn to see over time. But not all of us learn each skill perfectly, yet developmental visual skills are essential for school readiness and sports.
At Brighter Outlook Vision, we test each of these skills to see where the breakdown is happening and then create a personalized program of care to help fix or improve the problem. Our goal is for each person to live their best life without vision holding them back.
Vision Skill 1: Ability to maintain fixation
Fixation is a foundation skill of the visual system. It is defined as maintaining your gaze on a fixed target, it’s like a small staring contest. Teaching fixation involves enhancing basic learning skills: self-awareness, self-monitoring, self-correction, self-control, self-direction, and self-critiquing. The development of these skills builds self-confidence and self-esteem.
For the young and distractible child, learning to control the impulse to lose attention takes a lot of energy. We need to teach our brains the habit of attention. An impulsive child needs to learn to fixate with the whole body. They need to stop, calm themself, become centered and focused, think about (visualize) what they’re going to do, then do what they planned.
Vision Skill 2: Smooth eye movement control (pursuits)
Pursuits are when your eye follows an object moving in space, like watching a ball go across a field or following a plane in the sky. You should be able to track that item when your head is immobile or in motion. This is fixation in motion!
Vision Skill 3: Accurate and precise eye movements (saccades)
Saccades are quick eye movements, like when your eyes move from word to word on a page. When we read a line of print we must be able to make accurate jumps from one word to the next (or for very good readers, between groups of words). If one eye lags behind or jumps ahead of the next word you are reading then reading errors will occur. This may result in misreading words, skipping words, skipping whole lines, or reading the same word or line over and over again. You can imagine how this might make it difficult to understand what you are reading!
Vision Skill 4: Sustaining eye focus at distance
Some children do not have the ability to maintain clarity of focus for a long time, or they may be unable to quickly change the focus of their eyes from near to distance.
This skill is regulated by the parasympathetic nervous system. This same part of our nervous system unconsciously controls many different aspects of our bodies’ function. However, while most accommodation (eye focus) happens unconsciously, we can learn to consciously control this ability of our eyes.
Vision Skill 5: Sustaining eye focus at near
The amplitude of accommodation (sustaining eye focus at near) refers to the strength of the eyes’ ability to focus on a near object. The higher the amplitude of accommodation, the closer an object can be held to the eyes and sustained in focus for an extended period of time. This may also suggest how long someone may be able to maintain clarity of vision up close for prolonged periods of reading and writing.
Vision Skills 6/7: Simultaneous eye alignment at distance and at near
This is when your eyes work together to see things both up close and far away. We have two eyes that each send their own unique view of the world to the brain. It is then the brain’s job to combine these images into one, but when done well, this is largely what allows us to see the world in 3 dimensions! Seeing 3D isn’t just for action movies, though. This helps us accurately navigate the world as we walk through the woods or down the street, helps us know where the cup is when we fill our glass with water, and even gives our brain cues to help maintain alignment and clarity while reading (harder to do with a 2-dimensional screen than a 3-dimensional book, by the way).
Vision Skills 8/9: Sustaining eye alignment at distance and at near
We also must have the ability to keep both eyes looking at the same object over time, like a chalkboard or player on the field, or word on the page.
Vision Skill 10: Central visual acuity
This is what most people think vision is all about – 20/20 vision! This is the ability to see an object clearly. If the object is blurred, the type and percentage of blur can be measured, and eliminating this blur is what a glasses prescription is based on.
Vision Skill 11: Peripheral visual awareness
Your peripheral vision allows you to know what is all around you while your eyes are pointed straight ahead. If you look forward and wave your hand by your ear, can you see it? That’s peripheral vision! This helps you walk around without bumping into people, but it also tells you where one line of words ends and the next one begins! You might score perfectly on a peripheral vision test, meaning your eyeballs can do the work, but depending on your frame of mind, you might not be accessing that peripheral vision when you need to (like when reading).
Vision Skill 12: Color perception
Color perception is when you are generally able to tell different colors apart. Those who can’t are colorblind. This has a lot to do with the hardware we were born with, but we also learn to connect what we see through our language and culture to help communicate what we see. Don’t think language and culture play a role in how we see (or value) colors? It’s very interesting when you look into what different color words exist (or don’t exist) in different languages!
Vision Skill 13: Gross visual-motor coordination
This is the coordination of muscles, bones, and nerves to move around, from small (fine) movements like your eyes flicking around to large (gross movements) like your body moving through space. Moving yourself through space without bumping into things requires using information from your vision, but also translating that into action in our large muscle groups. Eye-hand coordination integrates both skills for both large (gross) action like sports and small (fine) action like handwriting.
Vision Skill 14: Fine visual-motor coordination
This is the smaller coordination of muscles, bones, and nerves to move around. Development of eye movement skills, such as tracking a ball, or having accurate eye jumps along a page for reading, is often dependent on first developing gross and fine motor skills. Eye movement skills are critical for building visual perception, or the brain’s interpretation of the information the eyes give it. Eye-hand coordination integrates both skills for both large action like sports and small action like handwriting.
Vision Skill 15: Visual discrimination
Visual discrimination is the ability to detect differences in and classify objects, symbols, or shapes. These can be categorized by color, position, form, pattern, texture, as well as size. For example, can someone tell a b from a d, or notice that nickels and dimes are the same color, but different sizes.
Vision Skill 16: Visual figure ground perception
Like finding Waldo, this is the ability to find something within a busy background. Children with these issues may look like they aren’t paying attention, but they really aren’t able to find an item in their messy room, pick out matching socks, or copy notes from the board.
Vision Skill 17: Visual memory
Visual memory is simply the ability to recall visual information. This is especially important for reading and learning. People may struggle to develop sight words or remember what they read if they have trouble visualizing it. In our daily lives, we combine visual memory with other forms of sensory memories to create a rich inner world of experience.
Vision Skill 18: Visual sequential memory
This is the ability to remember and recall a sequence of objects and/or events in the correct order. For example, a child with poor visual sequential memory may read a story well, but in re-telling it has difficulty recalling the order of events.
Vision Skill 19: Spatial awareness and relationships
Spatial awareness involves your ability to understand your location in space, as well as relations between other objects in space. Someone who struggles with this might bump into others and items, or maybe stand too close. They may also struggle with handwriting, or planning ahead when writing so their words fit appropriately in the space provided.
Vision Skill 20: Visual form constancy
This skill allows a child to understand that a shape, form or object stays the same even when it changes its position, size, or is in a different environment. They recognize the letter A no matter its size or font. This is also important for recognizing groups of letters in the context of different sounds or different words.
Vision Skill 21: Gestalt visual closure
This is the ability to visualize a complete whole when an incomplete picture is presented. In other words, when you see an image that has missing parts or is complex, your brain will fill in the blanks and make a complete image or simplify so that it still picks up a pattern. You might not think this happens much, but subconsciously our brain is constantly filling in blanks in the world around us based on our past experience (even that past that was just moments before). Sometimes this causes us to misperceive the world around us, but it can also lead to very efficient visual processing. For instance, this skill allows us to recognize words as we read without focusing on the individual details of each letter. A good reader can see a long word that starts with “Tha…” and ends with “…ving”, and not have to fixate on every letter to know for sure that it says “Thanksgiving”.
Vision Skill 22: Visual integration
This is when you can bring multiple skills together. When you see a word on a page and mentally match it to a word you’ve seen before so that you can remember it, that is visual integration.
Vision also integrates with our other system, like our auditory system. This links things that are seen with things that are heard, like when a teacher writes notes on the board and also says them out loud. We often incorporate sound (and other senses) with vision therapy activities to fully engage our minds and bodies.
If any one of these skills isn’t working efficiently, it can hold us back and make life more difficult than it needs to be. Connect with us for a free phone consultation or join us for a free workshop to see if vision could be at the root of your problem and learn how we can help.
