Visual Perceptual Skills and Activities of Daily Living – Hope Abilitation Medical Center

Visual perceptual skills important to function in day-to-day activities. They are the skills that processes information that an individual sees to the brain, and then it interprets all the information to make sense out of it.

Let’s go through the different types of visual perceptual skills and why are they important in one’s life for functioning:

1. Form Constancy

It is important for an individual to understand that a form, or shape doesn’t change even if it is different environment.

For e.g.: An alphabet, number or shape either be it in a book, board, or any other printed form, will remain the same, no matter where it is placed.

2. Visual Discrimination

Visual discrimination helps an individual to perceive a minor difference between them. It helps children specifically in reading without making any errors in similar looking alphabets.

For e.g.: Understanding the difference between alphabets lie p,q,b,d,m,w. etc.

3. Figure Ground Perception

It helps an individual to see things from a cluttered or busy background.

For e.g.: this skill helps a child to not lose his/her place when reading or when copying from the board.

4. Visual Closure

Visual closure helps an individual to make sense of an object or picture, which is partly visible. This helps in decoding or read more fluently.

5. Visual Memory and Visual Sequential Memory

Visual memory skills are essential to remember sight words, and visual sequential memory skills can help you remember the order of letters for spelling. It helps in word and sentence formation.

6. Visual Motor Integration

For e.g.: Sewing a thread through needle, buttoning, applying toothpaste on toothbrush, etc.

What If a Child or an Individual has Visual Perceptual Issues?

• If your child has poor visual perceptual skills, this can affect learning, reading, writing, and play skills. The different areas of visual perception impact learning in different ways.
• Good visual perceptual skills help brain process correct information that a child or an individual would see and perceive. It is also important to get the visual field checked from an optometrist before concluding for any visual perceptual difficulties.
• Children who have sensory processing disorder can also face visual perceptual difficulties.

How can Visual Perception Difficulties be Treated?

1. Engage the child in lot of fine motor and gross motor activities. This could include simple activities such a beading, lacing, Lego games, target throwing, animal walks, etc.
2. Use variety of visual perceptual activities like matching cards, jigsaw puzzles, maze activities, patterns, seek and find, crosswords, anagrams, etc.
3. Limit screen time- although screen can offer a lot of variety of visual perceptual games and activities, too much of screen time is not good for the vision and also the creative thinking is limited. A proper balance is advised between screen time and activities apart from screen time.
4. Referring to worksheets available might help in getting ideas, but it is important to customize the resources as per your child’s need.