Difference: Visual perception & Visual processing?

Laura,

I noticed no one answered your chain, which surprises me.

My daughter has visual processing delays. She had trouble with writing (but then again she also had fine motor problems) and with copying from the board. Her writing was all over the page, above and below the lines, poorly spaced and basically illegible. After SI OT she has improved dramatically although copying from the board is still tiring. She also has trouble tracking when reading, read in dim light and sometimes covered 1 eye when reading. Those are some of the systems she presented with when we had her evaluated and they were considered visual processing problems/delays.

Maybe since I answered your post it will help pique interest and someone more knowledgeable will post.

I am not more knowledgable but I have gained some interesting insight on visual perception from my new favorite book. Developing Your Child For Success.

This is an exerpt.
What is perception? Perception is identifying an understanding our environment. Visual perception is understanding what we see. Auditory perception is understanding what we hear. Tactile perception is understanding what we feel. It is the combination of all of them that gives us perception. A child develops perception through experiences with his environment. Each object, we also have an idea how it feels, smell or even tastes. When we hear a sound, we can visualize wht the object looks like that made the sound.

A child does not develop visual perception with his eyes alone, nor does he see with just one part of his brain. Meaningful vision is produced only by integrated sensory stimulii from our muscles, touch and our balance system.

End of exerpt…..
I don’t know if this helps. I have always thought they overlapped and I haven’t a clue how you would differentiate between perception and processing.

LindaF
Thanks for the input. Maybe that’s why they also mentioned the vestibular in my daughter’s OT work.

I’m afraid I am also not an expert on the subject. I can tell you my child could put together building projects intended for kids far beyond his age group. He was reading at a distance at age two. He scored very high on a nonverbal IQ test in everything but mazes. Turns out the child had convergence insufficiency ( unable to bring eye muscles together for nearpoint vision)He also had a bad astigmatism and is farsighted. Vision therapy helped him to see small print but is still having quirky errors in reading- skipping words, reading them out of order. He gets better in the summer and his reading becomes poor when he goes back to school each year making me think it must be eye strain. From my own experience, I was able to do very detailed art projects by the hour, crochet with sewing thread and I share some problems due to lazy eye, such as double vision when reading. Its facinating how the eye problems can curtail one activity but not another. (If a child is covering over one eye he should be taken for to a vision therapist or developmental optometrist. It is a strong symptom of a lazy eye and will most likely get worse without either more appropriate glasses or vision therapy or both.)

Not an expert either- but I don’t completely understand what you are looking for here.

Perception could be viewed as the input part- and processing is what your brain does with it. The two are closely connected but separate functions.

Robin

Farsighted plus astigmatism? Are you sure we’re not related?

Just one caveat — be careful of the logical fallacy — many people with lazy eye MAY cover one eye whn reading, but just because someone doesn’t cover an eye, that doesn’t mean lazy eye is absent. I have lazy eye badly because the astigmatism was deliberately ignoired, and I do NOT cover one eye.

Once again thank you everyone! After posting and realizing that I was probably asking a question relatively esoterical, I decided to contact some “experts” in visual perception/processing & cognition (Phd.s at various universities). I’ve received a couple of responses and even a great recommendation for someone top in the field who is local! :-)

My reason for asking is I’m starting to get a little frantic about my 8-year-old son’s reading. As some of you may know, I did PG with him intensively in the month of April and had very good results (his decoding skills soared and were quite impressive). But his fluency is still extremely slow (approx 18 wpm). He tends to skip, or have long pauses before simple words like “the” or “a,” loses his place, says “saw” when the word is “was,” or “should” for “would,” etc….

All of these seem to be symptomatic of a possible vision problem, but what perplexes me is that his results on the TVPS-R (visual perception test) shows an overall score in the 93%ile. I can’t understand how someone with superior visual perception can have a vision problem? Or how someone with a visual processing problem can even develop great visual perception?

I have my son read every day, but he HATES it. He counts the pages, does anything possible to avoid reading, and is beginning to “forget how to read.”

It’s very frustrating, because I thought that if I just made him read a lot everyday, he couldn’t help but learn….and it’s not happening. I can see he’s starting to “shut down” to reading. Also, now he tells me he’s stupid.

My dd’s speech and learning therapist has a great website. She explains visual, auditory, and motor processing disorders. The first URL is her home page : www.merrittspeech.com . The second URL is where visual processing disorder is explained : www.merrittspeech.com/serv_video.htm. I hope this helps.
Blessings,
Jan P.

Man, I had to look at this email twice, i thought i wrote it! my son is 8 also and i have done so many programs and strategies with him. i too, thought reading more would help him to increase his wpm, but it hasn’t , and like you, i’m unfortunately noticing the change in attitude. he was so gung-ho for all these last 3 years, k-2, to learn reading , but over the summer …..it changed. now he hates it! he’s had lots of vision problems, not 20/20 kind, just being able to track letters and etc. we went to minnesota vision therapy center and also a chance to grow in minneapolis to get help on the vision problem. we went through 40 weeks of therapy and he’s still having problems, it’s been 1 year since we finished the program , and i can tell you it help alot! it just wasn’t the answer to all of his problems, he’s also dyslexic, and were doing testing for the input, processing etc. at the univ. of minnesota, next month. i figure i got this year to help him get back to believing he “can read” maybe not like everyone else but , better. that’s all i hope for. i just want him to be able to read. some…..
Working on reading and phonics has helped , like your son , he can decode and write phonetically, but can’t remember how to spell words the write way. It amazes me all the time!
When you wrote
“He tends to skip, or have long pauses before simple words like “the” or “a,” loses his place, says “saw” when the word is “was,” or “should” for “would,” etc….”

This is exactly my son!

My son has Visual Stress. He is now 15 years old. We never knew he had this problem until a year ago. Effectively, he has been blind to text all his life. He cannot even see an analogue watch to tell the time. All he sees on a page is a big blurry blob. If he tries very hard, he can see two or three words. This works for his own writing as well. He had a trip to the opticians last Easter 2001, and as a result of that, has green lenses in his glasses. His eyesight is perfect, it is his brain which has difficulty processing the text. He also has an auditory processing disorder and is dyslexic, has trouble with processing complex instructions and lots of information quickly. He is very bright, and now that I have battled with his school, the teachers have been brilliant and differentiated for him, and he has had the best year in school he has ever had.
Do some research into auditory processing and visual stress on the net, find an optician who will give your child a coloured overlay test, and find an audiologist who will test your child for auditory processing disorders.
I cannot stress the difference the coloured lenses have made to my son. Please, please find someone to test your child’s visual stress. It sound to me that she has a similar difficulty to my son. I hope you have good luck. Please e-mail me, I can give you lots of web sites and point you in a good direction. Jan.