What is perceptual organization?

From the book “Assessment of Children” by Jerome Sattler

“The term Perceptual Organization describes the hypothesized ability underlying the factor for both item content (perceptual) and mental process (organization). This fator appears to measure a variable common to the Performance Scale subtests. Block Design, Object Assembly, and picure Completion have high loadings on the Perceptual Organization factor…”

Not very clear is it?

I’ll take a crack at defining Perceptual organization.

Perceptual organization is the ability to take in visual, auditory and sensory information and use that information effectively to accomplish a task.

Karen,

I found several general definitions in academic articles—the way certain stimili are group together; the in which persons organize and represent incoming stimulus information. It seems to have to do with cateogrizing and organizing incoming information.

In one article I looked at the vocational implications of someone weak in perceptual organization was that they shouldn’t have a job that requires a lot of classifying. Does that fit your child?

There is also an index called perceptual organization index on the WAIS III.

I found this.

Factor 2 was called the Perceptual Organization Index, and assesses nonverbal skills including fluid reasoning, attention to visual detail, and visual-motor integration. Unlike the Performance Scale, it is not as reliant on speed of processing, since it does not include the Coding subtest. This also gets to concept formation that does not require words.

Beth

I think the reason I can’t get my head around this is that the definitions often refer back to the WISC subtests. Well we know he is weaker on the performance side , hence the diagnosis of weak perceptual organization.

Sounds like this is the area (integrating incoming audio, visual, tactile) that gives him his NLD qualities.

Categorizing? hmmm. I’ll have to mull that over. He ‘s often making up games with complicated rules, levels, …. categories. Maybe its his way of trying to compensate. I have one LD friend (adult) who is the most organized person I know. SHe says she has to be that way to function.

We also suspect he has a serious processing speed issue. The results 3 years ago had coding as the real outlying score, with the other performance subtests in the 8-10 range. Not really weak, but relatively weak compared to his verbal skills. What is also confusing is the old neuro eval described his visual perceptual skills as being intact, but I would say based on the vision therapy we’ve persued that he has some weakness in these areas. Not auditory, or sensory perse. I suspect with him the issue isn’t the input, its the integration.

I can’t wait to get the results of this go around.

Thanks for helping me understand this area !!

Karen,

I think the categorizing your son is doing is auditory based and what I was referring to was visual based.

For me, the most useful way to think of perceptual organization is as a concept that is measured (or operationalized) by some IQ tests. It is NOT the same as the IQ performance part but rather perceptual organization is the underlying concept that is being measured. In statistical terms, the performance tests (minus coding) all load on perceptual organization. The tests each measure a different aspect of perceptual organization—thus variation in the subtests can occur.

One of the articles I found last night was measuring perceptual organization using some other sorts of tests. I couldn’t find it this morning though!!

Here are a couple simple sites that may help you put your arms around this.

http://www.scs.leeds.ac.uk/ugadmit/cogsci/percept/pages/vision.htm

http://www.graphics.cornell.edu/~jaf/projects/pn/form.html

Beth

Good articles.

I think one of the reasons my son scored in the average range, and the old psychologist didn’t emphasize this as an area of weakness was b/c he consistently scores very high in figure/ground measures. (off the charts for some reason). But as you say he could have a strength in one component of this area, and weaknesses in others. I think for him seeing the whole from various parts is difficult.

My son is much better at whole to part than parts to whole reasoning also. From what I have read this is typical of NLD, so this is probably where the NLDish comes from.

Beth

Beth ,
can you give me a real life example of what you mean? that would help alot I think…

For what its worth, a friend (mom of my son’s buddy) is a child psychiatrist so I posed the question to her. She said perceptual organization is the ability to integrate input from the senses, and in my son’s case she would imagine (knowing him as she does…) that a weakness in this would cause him to freeze up when confronted with too many things to attend to at the same time. Referred to it as “flooding” which is exactly what DS’s therapist called it. I love it when all mysources are consistent.

Karen,

Do you think “flooding” is similar to sensory overload? My son used to suffer from that a lot. We couldn’t go to restaurants for several years because he found them too noisy, for example. He would sorta shut down and then almost have a temper tantrum if we didn’t remove him quickly. He isn’t really like that any more. But I don’t think this is what you really mean—this behavior is more similar to what you might see with an autistic child.

Beth

Karen,
Did the optomotrist who you did vision therapy with pick up on this?

such a good question! I just pulled out the results I got from them.

They administered the Gardner Test of visual perceptual skills. He scored high in visual spatial and visual form constancy, but very low in visual discrimination. Low in Visual memory as well on another test.His overall visual perceptual skills were described as average to above average,. Which is consistent with our old neuropsych eval which describes his visual perceptual skills as “intact”. He is consistently off the charts on “figure/ground” (grandpa was a radiologist and daddy is an art expert so maybe there is some inherent skill there?!)

So you can see why I get confused about this. If his visual perceptual skills are average overall (albeit with variability among the sub areas) and his auditory skills are presumed strong - where does it go wrong for him? In the integration? Clearly the psychologist doing the testing has to explain this better to me.

It seems like he perceives the input individually OK, but is overwhelmed when too much or too many different types of input come his way.

Do you understand any of this ?

Here’s a hypothesis:

Perhaps he is getting lost in the details, not seeing the forest for the trees.

In my own and my family’s experience, we are all hypersensitive in many areas. But when you get too much stimulation coming in, you have to shut it down or else you get lost; and the shutting down can make you *appear* insensitive when actually the reverse is true.

One example of this is “cocktail party syndrome” which I suffer from. If you are listening to a person talk in a quiet space, you hear just fine. But when you are in an area with a lot of competing noise at the same frequency, such as all the voices at the cocktail party, you hear ten conversations at once and it is difficult to sort out the one voice you want to listen to so you don’t understand what is being said to you.
I have gotten much better at this; a combination of treatment of chronic respiratory infections and listening to a lot of music has helped. But I still find listening in a noisy environment exhausting and can’t manage to focus in classes or committees past a half hour. And in the grocery store where they have fans right over the checkout I always miss what the cashiers say to me and they have to call me a couple of times to get my attention, Lord knows what they think of me.

Another example is that when I was young I could see just fine — focused very very well on details, in fact too well. I could never do figure-ground type exercises because I was seeing all the parts but not integrating them into a whole. With all sorts of training, including art classes, and glasses for the astigmatism, suddenly this ability snapped into place when I was in my twenties and boy was that a weird feeling.

So a possible explanation of what is going on here is a similar pattern of hypersensitivity and overload which sometimes causes such confusion it looks like a weakness instead of a strength.
Formal music teaching and formal art teaching, which teach separating out details and doing analysis and synthesis, are what helped me and might help in your case too; these things can’t hurt of well taught and are worth working on. Direct teaching of handwriting and calligraphy are good. And sports can help with body integration and all those other confusing sensory inputs, especially sports which teach balance and timing — skiing, swimming, gymnastic and *supervised* trampoline, martial arts, dance (for boys, breakdance is socially acceptable).

It sounds like what might be going on is that if your son is presented with new visual material or new auditory material independent of each other then he does fine. If he is presented with new material both auditoraly and visually he shuts down one modality and concentrates on the other.

Example: Student is handed a worksheet and is told what to do. The student looks at the worksheet and does not hear the directions because he cannot both listen and visually attend to the worksheet at the same time.

If your son had this problem then tests where directions are given before the material is visually shown to him he would score fine.

Thanks Victor and Helen,
I think you are both right, and your examples help me sort this out!

Further informal feedback from our tester still indicates that there are visual and auditory perceptual weakness. The doctor said once my son is able to put it in memory its fine. (He has good working memory and very good auditory memory from what I know.) But that if too much is happening it doesn’t make it into memory - sort of slides off of him.

And this is in a class of 6-10 students ina very quiet, structured school. Yikes, makes me wonder how we will ever mainstream him!

But i do think he is improving. He used to have difficulty playing team sports b/c he clearly couldn’t watch the ball, watch the other players and move to the right spot at the right time. This is much better after vision therapy and all the other things we do!

Here’s some good news that has come out of the testing so far: He is decoding on grade level!!!!!

Karen,

Decoding on grade level!! What a triumph for all of you!

I just wanted to say that our NN provider has described my son as an “integration kid.” I don’t think the break downs are at the same points you describe with your son, however. But it is in the putting together rather than the individual skills that we find his greatest weakness. I think this is more difficult to remediate than the individual pieces.

Based our experience, the good news is that improving any part of the configuration helps. Working on vestibular integration with NN improved his speed of vision processing by several years in one year (even though we did nothing directly with vision). We saw vision efficiency improvements (tracking) when his decoding improved. Basically, we reduced the stress of integration by improving one of his skills.

I think of it this way…even if the primary deficit is integration, it is easier to integrate if the pieces are stronger—less mental effort.

Beth

Hi Karen,
Your quest to figure out exactly how and why these breakdowns occur remind me of my own mission awhile back trying to discover the differences between visual processing and visual perception and how one can have strong visual perception with poor visual processing (you’d think one would need to visually process well in order to develop good visual perception?).

I wish I had some good answers for you. I think a lot of these processing problems our children have are probably neurologically based, and they are extremely difficult to treat. Maybe you and I need to take our boys to Florida this summer for NeuroNet? :wink:

I think you are right. Can we include a trip to disney?

This is why I had high hopes for Interactive Metronome back when, but we didn’t see much. I still feell there is room for some kind of motor/ OT type of therapy to get at the root. But my son is almost 11 and I wonder how much bang for our buck we can get at this point. We’ll see what the report recommends….

Well, for something that will hold a teen’s interest and have the most bang for the buck, I’d say do things that are valuable and valued in themselves, with therapeutic effects as a side bonus. Learn to play the guitar, learn to ski, join a swim team, learn calligraphy, do woodworking, learn electronics and build some things from Radio Shack, get Dance Dance Revolution … things like that. If possible get a trial lesson to make sure it is possible, and then go for it.

Laura,

You may be on to something. We did integration work that seems similar to neuronet with vision therapy. I thought the vision therapy we did was such a mix of the best of treatments I have read about on these boards therefore it is difficult to say which of those interventions had the biggest impact.

I mentioned a book called, “Integrating Mind Brain and Body Through Movement” by Etta Rowley which we did as one piece of vision therapy. Some of these relatively simple exercises were very difficult for my son. Interestingly my much younger son had no problem with any of them.

We also did alot of work with metronomes working on right/left differentiation and motor timing.

Some of these exercises sounded similar to the exercises Beth did through neuronet and balametrics.

On the age thing: my son is 11.5 and we have gone back to doing NN. The developer of NN, our therapist, now uses a CD based program which is more systematic than what she did when Nathan started with her. It is my last ditch effort to fill in all the neurological holes (except maybe doing V and V at some point). There are 7 CDs. She started him on CD 5. He is now on 6.

I also agree with Victoria on the doing the life things that improve skills. The trick is to get kids to the point that they can enjoy those things. My son has turned into a very good drawer from years of therapy. Or more accurately, therapy has made it possible for my son to become a very good drawer. He was a kid whose drawings were immature by several years. Now he sits in his room and draws for hours, trying to reproduce what he sees in books.

Beth

I will let you know what results we see but I will tell you that some of the people she sees are in college. They drive themselves and I presume they would not keep on

I agree with Beth and Victoria. I really think piano has helped my son. It takes so much integration to play with both hands. He does not progress as fast as some of our teacher’s other students but luckily this teacher is patient and he is making progress.

We also do so many sports. I believe my husband has was somewhat remediated from all of the sports he played as a child. My mother in law would complain of her dear husband. He never fixed anything, he was always out there playing baseball, football and basketball with the kids.

My son just started playing basketball. He never played before but really isn’t that bad all things considered.

My son was on the school JV basketball team this fall (5-6th grade). He wasn’t a starter (only one fifth grader was) and didn’t play as much as he would have liked. But intererestingly enough he was better at the NN vestibular exercises afterwards. (We took a break from NN during basketball season). According to our NN provider, basketball is a very vestibular sport and thus a tough one for a kid with my child’s profile. He is playing on a church league this spring in hopes of improving his skills enough to play more next year.

I’d love for my son to take piano lessons like yours, Linda. It was what his IM therapist recommended for him as followup. But he doesn’t have any interest….and after all the therapy, I have a hard time insisting on a leisure activity, if you know what I mean.

Beth

That is interesting Beth. My son plays so many sports but we just never signed him up for basketball. He just loves basketball. He has this big smile on his face the whole time he is playing. I wish I signed him up earlier.

Maybe he is getting the vestibular stimulation his little brain needs.

I wish all of these things mentioned were as effective for my son. He has done years of marital arts, piano, jumping on a trampoline, some basketball and I do see *some* improvement in reading, learning and language, but it’s hard for me to know just how much is from everything we’ve done or simple maturation. The improvements are not that pronounced. (Who knows, maybe if we hadn’t done them my son would have been much worse off?)

I’d never stop having my son participate in all these activities. I do think they are beneficial and highly recommend other parents have their children involved in this type of thing, but some kids really are very difficult to remediate.

Hi,
I agree that some kids are hard to remediate and that sports involvement certainly helps. My son (NLD) and I are currently taking a break from Neuronet after having done FastForword, PG, Interactive Metronome, and some Pace/NN for 6 months. I feel a little guilty about this break but neither of us can cope with it just now until after Christmas. We are doing Quarter Mile Math and not much else apart from homework projects.

However, my son (now 4 months away from being 12) enrolled in badminton this year, his favourite sport. I am not sure how vestibular it is, but after a few months the coach suggested that he had really developed fast and was ready for intensive coaching at a downtown clinic that trains from the recreational to the Olympic level. As hers is primarily a social club, most of the members who go the competitive route train at the clinic. This suggestion was a real boost for my son. Because he is enrolled in snowboarding, he decided he had enough on his plate with two activities so he will do a badminton clinic in the March break when we would ordinarily be running off to our NN provider. (We’ll take off school and work to see her as she is 300 miles away.)

I know badminton is a lot easier on his ego, just now, and when we return to NN, he may have gotten over some hurdles with it that he had previously. I saw changes after a week long sports camp he was in, for ex. I think his difficulties with NN also relate primarily to integration difficulties.

The earlier therapies like NN are done, I think, the better. I can see a teenager emerging and some opposition to the whole concept of therapies. (Part of the reason for my break is that I have tightened up generally and had to let something go for awhile - ie video games on weekends only with a time limit, one hr. max. of TV/day after homework is done, mandatory math drill, a somewhat increased number of chores.)

Integration is my son’s primary area of need. As Victoria says some of the pieces get added later. For others, there may be a ceiling. Attentional difficulties can also be a part of the picture, with an impact in this area.

I think learning to type is a wonderful integrative activity and a useful one too, so if we need a NN break again in the future, that’s what we’ll do next, along with enrolling in a trampoline class if I can find one.

Any opinions on snowboarding vs. downhill skiing in terms of vestibular development? (We also cross country ski - I’d like us to join a club because it is just a great all round sport and likely a good one for someone with NLD and the right climate. Too bad snowfall is getting unreliable in the Great White North!)

I ski downhill and *if* done right, it is a **fantastic** vestibular activity. Did me a lot of good — just think of the demands of dynamic balancing, not just balancing on your feet on a stable surface, but constantly adjusting your balance to changing surface, direction, and speed. Snowboarding has exactly the same benefits; choose whichever he wants to do — snowboard is the in thing right now and if his friends do it, go for it.

Please, please, do it right. I used to work as a ski patroller, and THE person to get scraped up from the hill with an injury is a teenage/twenties boy with borrowed equipment whose friends thought it would be a hoot to take him up the expert trail for his first run.

Skiing and snowboarding *if* done properly are no more dangerous than any other active sport. You wouldn’t put a kid on a bicycle for the first time and put him on a busy public highway, but people somehow think they can do that on the mountain, and that’s where the bad rep comes from.

First get good equipment from a reputable dealer and get the release bindings properly adjusted by a professional (I know ski bindings and can give detailed advice if you ask me by email; for snowboard go to a couple of shops and talk to the people and get a feel for the best — new sport so the equipment is evolving rapidly). Used equipment is perfectly OK, in fact I recommend it highly — ski swaps are a great resource — but before paying for it check with the local ski shop that the bindings are not outdated (they won’t work on things more than six to eight years old). Make sure the boots fit properly; use the ski swap to adjust for growth, never ever oversized boots.

Then get proper lessons. Group lessons are OK for a while especially for a beginner. Small local hills are OK for a beginner and often have really good lesson packages; save the big boys (Tremblant, Orford, Jay, Killington) for when he knows enough to get the real fun out of them. The lessons are therapeutic in and of themselves — body positioning, timing, balance, etc. And since everyone else is also klutzing all over the hill, he won’t feel so bad in a group. A group with adults is great because the teens outpace the adults and he’ll feel good, just avoid a little kids’ class. After intermediate level, or if he stalls, private lessons can work wonders (they did for me).

I’m trying to get the roommates out to the hill this weekend — Saint Sauveur has been open for a month, Orford and Tremblant opened today, and the roomies are dragging their feet. Wanna meet me at the nearest mountain?

Hey guys, I thought this thread was dead - I haven’t been getting the updates. Wow, what a bunch of great ideas.

laura, we also , by luck I guess, have had DS involved in many of the activities mentioned here. He’s been a competitive swimmer since he was 5. I think you have to assume they’ve helped along the way and god knows how much worse his skills would be if you hadn’t done them!

He started playing soccer last year after we moved to the suburbs. And for the first time he was able to integrate the action on the field, ball and himself. Maturity? VT? who knows. This year his team won the championship and he also met some kids who will at least say hi if they see him on the street . (since he’s at a private school meeting neighborhood kids is difficult.)

We also started our kids on skiing 3 winters ago. ANd because he’s in an LD school he now has time for martial arts. All of these things have to be helping. I hope so because I dont’ have the emotional energy to insist that he stop doing all these fun social activities to go back and do more VT or IM.

I discussed the slow processing with the psychologist and he assured me that it will improve with maturity and as skills become more automatic.

that was me, KarenN. Not Guest.

Hope you’re out on the mountains this weekend, Victoria…time to kick the roomies out of doors because this massive snowfall is great!

Thanks for the advice. We got the right gear from a reputable place and are signed up for lessons from a good spot. You’ve got all the really big hills near you. I’ve skiied cross country at St. Sauveur and downhill at Bromont but having taken up downhill in my 30s I never really got fearless enough to go for it, despite group and a couple of private lessons. So I’ll meet you at the bottom of the hill and head off on my Nordic skiis, or meet you for lunch afterwards! (Why I can fearlessly tackle advanced nordic trails but not the easy downhill runs I don’t know.)

My LD son has taken the first level of boarding and is ready for level 2. He’s pretty good - better than his extremely athletic little brother who found it a humbling experience on a smallish hill they tried last year.

As an NLDer myself I was always a disaster at basketball and most team sports. In my late 20s I went with a group of fellow teachers cross country skiing after school on Fridays, bushwacking in various parts of our fairly remote county, often skiing back by moonlight with wolves howling off in the distance. (I know, we were crazy!) One of my group was a triathlete, another 2 were marathoners. I found myself literally going backwards a lot of the time initially. But I went out daily after school on my own (knowing that the school team would find me if I came to grief) and got good fast. It’s amazing what a confidence booster proficiency in a sport is! I think I’ve mentioned before that all sorts of computational skills I’d lacked earlier came together in my 20s.

My son’s skill at badminton emerged after doing IM - which seemed to have no visible benefits in academic areas. (He was at the time already reading at grade level. Now I think he’s above as I was reading Watership Down to both boys aloud last night ,and he got so keen on it he read five chapters on his own. He is also now deep into Kenneth Oppel’s Airborn, which he says is the best book he’s ever read to date, and it is above his grade six gr. level. So maybe his reading level has jumped recently.)

Badminton is an under-rated sport, I think, great for agility, timing reflexes, hand-eye coordination—good off-season training for other sports too. Because he has APD he can’t always hear coach’s instructions in noisy gyms but this is not a problem so far. Our NN provider told us that sports can do a lot of what programs like hers refine.

The trick is to find those sports where kids can excel and thrive and get that positive feedback pretty quickly. And to find more than one so you can work on multiple areas.

Though boarding is hard initially, I’m told, and takes more muscular development, the learning curve is shorter than for downhill.

Happy skiing!

Karen,
You’re right. It very well could be that if we hadn’t been doing all these things my son would be worse off. I work with kids who struggle more than he does. Sometimes I’ll be nearby when he’s working on homework and I’m surprised how well he’s doing (Like with grammar!).

Then again there are other times he struggles quite a bit. Particularly with social studies and sometimes science. The reading is overwhelming! I’ve been teaching him little “tricks” with the vocabulary and key concepts by showing him how to scan for highlighted terminology, using the glossary, etc…

I’m thinking about having my son start tennis lessons. We have a community tennis court directly across the street from our house (what could be more convenient!). I’ve heard activities like tennis are good for midline crossover (helping both sides of the brain communicate). Yet, I’ve also heard that you can work with this part of the brain up until about age 10 or 11 and then it’s “set.” But I don’t know if that’s accurate.

BTW, snowboarding is excellent for blance, coordination and vestibular. We start our kids with skiing and once they are proficient we move them into snowboarding (and we always put them in the ski/snowboarding classes). Both skiing and snowboarding are very different from each other. I personally think it’s nice to have kids learn both (although I only know how to ski. I’m just too old to start snowboarding —that’s my excuse! — although my husband is older than me and on his second day snowboarding he was shooting easily down the intermediate slopes. Showoff!!! ;-)

Of course, you folks up in Canada have much better snow!!!!!

Kind of a tangent, but we started our kids on ski’s 3 years ago so they are intermediate at best. I’m wondering if I should keep DS on ski’s this winter or encourage him to snowboard. Frm a motor planning perspective, is one better than the other?

Well, my daughter and I both tried a snowboard when she was about fifteen and I was well over forty … I actually turned a bit better than she did, although she stayed up for some longer runs. I haven’t had a chance to really work on it but figure I could master it with a few full ski days of real practice.

I think skiing and snowboarding are about equal in both difficulty and in benefits. The issue is that you are going to control your motion in a dynamic sliding situation by making fine changes in your body position, legs and arms and torso and head all working together, using both sides of the body evenly (cannot turn just to the left …), and by making delicate shifts of your weight and balance. You have to make these adjustments in real time at a fair speed, reacting to an irregular and somewhat unpredictable surface. One sliding surface or two isn’t going to make a big difference, just a different position to work from.

Better snow indeed! Eight inches in my front yard over Friday-Saturday, two inches while I was driving home tonight and more still coming! Yahoo!