What Can You Learn by Using the LEA CVI Kit?
By Lea Hyvärinen, MD from www.lea-test.fi
If an infant is known to have brain damage, sensory functions are nowadays examined better than ten years ago but still functions like accommodation and use of vision in communication are not assessed, although it is well known that early interaction lays the foundation for emotional development. If brain damage is not diagnosed, cognitive visual impairment very often is misunderstood. The child is felt to be autistic and developmentally delayed because the behaviors of visually impaired children mimic those of autistic children.
Parallel pathways are the important features of visual pathways. At each level of functions we have parallel functions that can become impaired one more than the other. This leads to the great variation that we see in visual impairments and explains why clinical measurements do not depict the severity of impairment and even less depict disabilities.
If the child’s intellectual development is normal (s)he learns to avoid difficult situations by using compensatory functions. If recognition of facial features and facial expressions is difficult the child may not be able to cope with the highly visual communication used by toddlers. To a child who is strongly dependent on auditory information a noisy school is often so stressful that (s)he may withdraw from play situations. Children who cannot recognize people, may be upset in shops, on beach etc. because of a fear of loosing the parent in a crowd, etc.
When a child has difficulty with increased crowding (s)he may learn letters early but cannot learn to read words longer than 2-3 letters. A 4 year-old described how letters glide partially on top of each other beautifully by saying, “Letters in longer words ‘hug each other’”. A child with 20/25 visual acuity with single symbols at distance, may have 20/250 visual acuity at near when tested with the crowded side of my LEA Symbols Near Test #A250800 and may need to read with a Closed Circuit TV. Children whose form perception is better through ‘form in motion’ may wiggle the text under the CCTV to increase input through that channel.
Some children may have problems with eye-hand-coordination, the structure of egocentric space, with perception of complex pictures or perception of surface qualities, textures. When a child’s spatial concepts are weak or distorted, orientation in space is difficult. In extreme cases a child may not understand how to go around an obstacle or may get lost even in the living room. Some children do not see the difference between shadows and thresholds and use tactile information to confirm the structure, i.e. feel with their foot or hand.
When perception of objects on a background is disturbed, the child learns to use memory to find his/her toys, cloths etc. placing them in a certain order like blind children. If somebody moves one of the items, the child may be upset when not finding it on its place and not noticing it less than a foot and a half away.
If motion perception is poor a child may have peculiar fears of small dogs but not big dogs since small dogs move quickly from place to place and if the movement is not perceived, the dog may appear here and there. The child may never know where it is going to appear next. These children later have great problems in traffic. Even if they learn to conclude that a car must be moving, since moments before it was in front of a house and now is in front of another house, they do not experience the essential elements of relative and real movements.
Picture puzzles are useful in assessing a child’s ability to use parts to build a complete picture or object. Some children cannot see complex pictures but may be able to place puzzle pieces so that they fit in their places but not see how they are connected with the content of the picture. This child sees forms and their orientation but cannot use that information to interpret pictures. Puzzles need to be both very simple and more complex to reveal which step in solving the problem is the most inhibiting one.
Evaluation of CVI children requires working in small segments of time. While
you are gathering information about how the child performs visually, do not
forget to play and have fun.
VISION ASSOCIATES 2109 US Hwy 90 West #170-312, Lake City, FL 32055, (407) 352-1200 www.visionkits.com