Signs and symptoms of a Visual Processing Deficit can include: Visual Perceptual and Visual Processing Deficits affect people in different ways. Who Should Have a Visual Processing Assessment?Ī Visual Processing Assessment should be performed, for children, when there are concerns regarding their ability to learn from visually-presented material. It is a lifelong challenge unless diagnosed and treated. Again, visual processing disorder is not a condition that someone outgrows. Additionally, individuals with visual processing disorder are overall slower readers and usually with below grade-level comprehension rates. It is easy to understand why an individual with Visual Processing Disorder will learn to read at a significantly slower rate, and with greater effort by the individual as well as the parents and educator, than someone with intact visual processing skills.
An individual with Visual Processing Disorder will require a greater number of exposures, more typically in the range of 10 to 15 times more often in order to recall visual information, for example a word. Instead, parents and educators typically notice visual processing disorders when a child is learning. Visual Processing Disorder will not be detected on an eye chart. These are the visual processing skills required to identify similarities and differences in objects (such as differentiating the letters b and d), identify visually-important information in a crowded background (such as a friend in a crowd) and quickly make decisions based on a changing environment (quickly stopping a car if someone walks in front of it). Visual Processing Disorder involves difficulties interpreting and understanding visual information, which also includes movement, spatial relationships, form, and direction.