visual discrimination

This is an indication of developmental vision delay. Typically, this is best evaluated by a developmental optometrist and treated with vision therapy to bring visual efficiency skills up to age-appropriate levels. Some children also need cognitive training, after vision therapy, to develop visual processing skills.

Websites with more information are http://www.children-special-needs.org, http://www.vision3d.com, and http://www.covd.org.

Developmental vision delays often cause problems with short-term visual memory and sequencing. My own daughter was not able to read fluently until she had finished vision therapy and was halfway through a cognitive training program. Although she had basic decoding skills, she could not visually process text fast enough to apply what she knew.

Mary

Hi Perry,

I agree with Mary on this, but would add that the child might not know the vowel sound in the words. In other words, it might simply be an instructional problem, and I would try that before referring to an optometrist (which you may have trouble doing anyway, if you work for a public school….some schools discourage such referrals.)

By the way, a method that both Mary and I agree works well is Phono-Graphix. If, after several weeks of Phono-Graphix, the reading problems show little sign of diminishing, I would go with the behavioral optometrist. However, if the reading instruction works, you will probably find the visual discrimination improving, as it’s a developmental skill that obviously comes in handy when reading.

Good luck…..Rod

I second Rod absolutely on this.

The most common cause, by far, of poor reading and near-zero phonics knowledge is poor instruction and near-zero phonics teaching.

The second most common cause is late-developing (or sometimes poorly nurtured) speech/hearing leading to poor auditory discriminitation and/or inability to understand and follow the instructions (and this of course snowballs as reading instruction progresses)

A third cause, after these, is visual discrimination difficulty.

Rod often champions developmental optometry for those children who *do* have tracking problems; when he says to hold off on the optometrist and work on basic good teaching first, you know you are getting unbiased advice.

This student has had and continues to receive instruction in phonics. She knows all the letter/sounds and vowel sounds in isolation. The reason I think she has a vision problem, other than sight because that has been checked to be normal, is that she has a terrible time learning sight words (she will learn them one day and not know them the next) and will confuse closely spelled words like then/they, what/that. She also struggles with her weekly spelling test. I know she studies and studies but is not able to score 100%.

Is there a way for me to assess this student’s short-term visual memory and sequencing?

who had severe developmental vision delays. She was totally unable to memorize sight words. Although she now reads at an advanced level (thanks to interventions), her spelling is still four grade levels behind.

I wish I had a better answer to your question. The NEPSY may include tests of short-term visual memory and sequencing. I don’t know much about this test, except that it is supposed to be a comprehensive test of cognitive skills. Short-term visual memory and sequencing would be considered cognitive skills.

After vision therapy, my daughter tested age-appropriate for visual efficiency skills, but still had problems with reading fluency. The clinic gave her two rather interesting tests. In the first one, the tester said a word and my daughter had to write it down. If she came anywhere near being phonetically correct, the answer was marked correct. My daughter got 7 out of 10 correct. In the second one, the tester held up a flashcard with a word my daughter could read easily (“ball” comes to mind), put it down, and then my daughter had to write the word from memory. She got 0 out of 10 correct. The clinic told me she was dyseidesic (no visual memory for words).

Cognitive skills build on sensory/motor skills. Because my daughter had not been using her eyes correctly for many years (the developmental vision problems with binocularity, focusing, field-of-vision, convergence, tracking, etc.), she had not developed automaticity with visual sequencing and short-term memory — something most of us take for granted. Cognitive training programs address this problem. We did PACE (Processing and Cognitive Enhancement, http://www.learninginfo.com), but a much less expensive cognitive training program that has a good visual component is Audiblox (http://www.audiblox2000.com).

Now that I think of it, PACE providers normally provide free evaluations. That would be one way of getting visual processing assessed, but the parents would have to make the appointment.

Mary

Hi,

First, thanks victoria, for the kind words.

Mary, I’m curious how you would explain something that bothers me about your daughter’s failure to write any of the words that she was shown.

As I understand it, she could “hear” the spoken words and did a reasonable job phonetically reproducing most of them. However, when “shown” the words, which you say she could read easily, she could not reproduce them….correct?

Assuming I’m following you so far, here’s what bothers me. Reading is a process of converting visual elements (print) to sound in the mind. In other words, your daughter should have been saying “ball” to herself upon seeing the word, as opposed to, for example, trying to remember each visual element without the support of phonetic info…as in, “Let’s see, gotta remember a stick first, with a circle attached, then another circle, with a little line on it, then a couple more lines.”

My conclusion, if I clearly understand the test procedure you’ve described, is that she wasn’t making the mental conversion from print to sound. If she was, she would then have been in the exact same position she was when she passed the test where spoken words were presented, i.e., she would have had the sounds of the word “ball” in her head, and would have simply phonetically reproduced “ball.” In fact, since she had just seen “ball” in print, I would expect a higher score than on the auditory test. I would especially expect this result if she were to read the word aloud, as then there would be no question that she had “heard” the sounds in the word (from her own voice.)

To me, this reflects a failure, or an inability, to convert the visual to the auditory representation silently, not a failure to remember visual signals. A better test (and I’m really out of my depth here) would seem to be to show her a very simple image, say a circle, or a pair of crossed lines, and see if she then drew a circle (or lines) after the stimulus was withdrawn. If she couldn’t, she would then apparently have no visual memory. Any thoughts on this?

Incidentally, I have met one adult who claimed to have such a problem. He said he cannot remember faces at all, has to say the time when he looks at the clock (to put it into his auditory memory) or he will not remember the time, and furthermore, he has no dreams, or at least no visual element in them. He didn’t realize he had the problem until military testing revealed it as an adult.

And Perry, I essentially have the same type of problem with your testing of “visual discrimination.” To test visual discrimination on it’s own, you need to separate out the code knowledge component. Show an image and see if the child can copy it. There are visual discrimination tests out there which do not involve knowing phonetic information…..Rod

I could not remember faces at all until I was in my thirties; still am terrible at it. I can draw, but couldn’t draw faces until my thirties either, and still am terrible at it.

I still have a bit of trouble reading clocks and often check my watch repeatedly. My daughter has great trouble with analog clocks and insists on digital.

Doesn’t stop me being a reader and a writer, however.
Thanks to Mom and Mrs. Ross for actually teaching me to read and write, not wallowing in problems.

It seems everything that came up had a significant sound element in it.

Because of logic skills, I could do *well* on many “visual-spatial reasoning” tests… but if they were only visual, things drop rather seriously. I would chekc out the auditory issues too — there may be both, and the auditory is the more involved in reading.

This has nothing to do with the original post but I was intrigued and excited by Rod’s and Victoria’s posts about people who don’t remember or recognize faces. My closest friend has this problem, in fact it’s true of her entire family (all 9 siblings). I believe it’s called prostagnocia (my spelling might be off). She’s trying to get it researched because she believes that it can be a real impairment. Social occasions are very difficult for her because although she may have met and spoken for a couple HOURS with someone just one month prior, she might not recognize them at all upon meeting them again.

She’s made herself a program of studying faces. She cuts out pictures of people and glues them into a book. She has them all classified based on various characteristics: strong chin, thin nose, etc. She’s also begun taking drawing classes and reading books on stage makeup. She’s looking for a sculpture class so she can learn to sculpt human faces. She recently told me that she’s suddenly made a major discovery: faces are now 3-D to her! She’d love to correspond with anyone who shares this problem.

Interestingly, she was an A student all through school. When I was learning the LMB programs, I’d practice on her. She doesn’t have great auditory discrimination- she struggled with some of the LIPS nonsense words and esp. with the Seeing Stars program. That came as a surprise to myself as well. She’s well-known as being completely ignorant in following directions, gets lost easily, and can’t read a map. Geometry was her strongest subject in school.

She would really like to see funding for the study of persons who don’t recognize faces and she’s putting together a paper to send to various research centers asking about it. So if any of you know about any research in this field, please let me know.

First off, I should clarify that the flashcard was shown to her for only a short period of time — a couple of seconds — before it was put away.

I think that “dyseidesia” — which is supposed to mean no visual memory *for words* — is actually misleading. I am beginning to think that the real problem was some combination of slow visual discrimination and/or poor sequencing ability. The end result was that she couldn’t make sense out of what she saw, and therefore couldn’t reproduce what she had seen.

In my daughter’s case, I really think the major problem may have been sequencing. It always puzzled me why her short-term visual memory should be bad, because she is a good artist — can glance at a picture and then reproduce it in great detail from memory. She was never diagnosed with any auditory processing problem, and her auditory memory is startlingly good (“elephant” comes to mind). Also, she had no trouble at all learning basic code with Reading Reflex. However, in spite of having a good auditory memory, even at the age of 8 she could not reliably recite the alphabet — always leaving something out, or getting a section out of order. It was quite amazing, because we must have sung that alphabet song around the house for four years!

Anyway, with the flashcard situation, I think that my daughter could not visually process the letters on the card fast enough to make the auditory connection before the card was put away. I suspect that the letters were a “mish mash” to her visually. Even if she had enough time to visually discriminate that there were four letters, if those four letters didn’t form a gestalt of “ball” in her mind, they held no meaning for her and she wasn’t able to retain them (even out of order. Her answers on this test bore no relation at all to the words she had seen.)

I think your analysis is correct — she wasn’t making the conversion from print to sound. However, I don’t think it was because of some fault in doing this silently, but rather that her visual processing was so slow she couldn’t make the visual-auditory connection before the card was put away. Perhaps poor short-term visual memory played a role also, because most of us could retain a visual memory of the word “ball” long enough to figure out what it was, even if the card had been taken away. Or, we remember some of the letters. However, she couldn’t. She could, however, form a detailed visual memory of a graphic picture! I think this is because a graphic picture is a gestalt — no sequencing required — and makes sense in and of itself. Even when the picture has disparate parts, they are spatially related to one another.

I’m not explaining this well, because I haven’t pulled all the threads together in my own mind. There are so many tantalizing clues.

I do know that my daughter had great trouble learning and retaining math facts. Maybe this is related to not having a “gestalt” for math facts. “5 x 7 = 35” just doesn’t seem to form any meaningful picture in her mind. She is also having extreme difficulty learning to read music for the piano. Although she plays at a beginning 3rd year level, she still cannot reliably identify middle C. Perhaps because the notes don’t form a “gestalt” for her? The way I see this relating to the dyseidesia test is this — perhaps, unless she could form a “gestalt” of a word via hearing it, or having enough time to visually process it, the individual elements that formed the word had no meaning for her — and so she couldn’t reproduce any of them. (For example, after seeing the word “ball”, she didn’t even write down a “b” as one of the letters in the word. The letters she wrote seemed almost randomly chosen.)

Clear as mud, huh? Sometimes I wonder……….

Mary

I bought a book intended for OT’s to work with children with visual processing problems. It had a bunch of different subareas. The book distinguished between visual memory and visual sequential memory. Like Mary’s daughter, my son had a much more difficult time with the sequential tasks than the visual memory tasks. Now, unlike Mary’s daughter, my son still wasn’t wonderful with straight visual memory tasks either.

My son had a similar test done as part of a visual exam by a developmental optometrist. He held a card up for a few seconds and you had to repeat what you saw. My son couldn’t process fast enough—or at least that is what the optometrist said was going on. Now, he tried it with me (I was trying it with my son simultaneously and thought it was hard) and I wasn’t great either. I have no problems reading or anything related so must just be old age!!!!

I notice this deficit coming out with copying with my son. He doesn’t seem to retain more than two letters so he keeps looking back and forth. He also doesn’t process print visually as quickly as most people–although this improved a lot with doing PACE.
Beth

Hi Sue, Mary,

I don’t know. But from what you’re both saying, your kids (at the time of those testings anyway) both sound like they were insecure in their code knowledge, i.e., their letter/sound correspondences. Yes, they may have known every letter in isolation, but it appears that they were not comfortable incorporating that knowledge within a strategy of reading a real word.

Hence, Mary, your child could not recognize the word “ball” even though knowing the sounds of letters.

And Sue, your child would be going back and forth between word and pencil because of an uncertainty of the sounds in words. I see this a lot in poor readers early in remediation. The child has no confidence that they really “hear” the separate sounds in a word like “string” and so they look back every single letter to make sure they’re spelling it correctly. I cover the word and tell them to write down the sounds in “string.” If they’ve been taught some basic code knowledge and how to segment sounds properly by then, they find that they can do it.

Thanks for responding…..Rod

Rod,

You probably are right about the going back and forth with copying— insecurity is at least part of it. But there is something about rapid processing of visual sequencial information that is important here too. My son behaves similarly if the information is numeric rather than letters. In fact, I think the optometrist used numbers.

Beth

Hi Beth,

No argument from me on that…..I’d be one of the last to claim we’ve figured out everything involved in reading problems. I was just trying to sort out the things actually being tested in both perry’s and Mary’s situations……Rod

I’ ve tried three times to post a very long version of this argument elsewhere, and three times been timed out and lost all my typing. So here’s a short version - if lacking in some discussion and backup and looking a bit curt, please talk to me more; the system just won’t take the detailed version.

Mary — I simply don’t believe in sight words. Period.

I never learned a sight word in my life. No, not one. My mon taught us phonics after the school made a complete botch with my older brother’s reading, and then I used the phonics rules to teach myself everything else about reading. And I think you’ll agree from seeing me here that I read and write fairly well …

I don’t teach sight words. Never.

I never taught my daughter a single sight word. And she was reading at an advanced level before kindergarten, and has read and written on an adult level since age 8 or 9, not counting the other three languages she reads and writes.

I never taught a single sight word to my disabled students with Kleinfelter’s Syndrome. One was twelve and had had eight years of sight word teaching, with the result that he had achieved a low Grade 1 level. The other was eight and had had three years of sight word teaching with the result that he read absolutely zero. The school system had a barrier set up that you absolutely had to bruite memorize two hundred words by sight before you were let into the secret of phonics. I skipped this, taught phonics *including* segmenting, blending, vowel rules, and words with irregular letters, but *no* sight words; in six months the twelve-year old progressed to Grade 4 level in oral reading and the eight-year old to end of Grade 1.

I am refusing to teach sight words to the Grade 3 kids in French Immersion that I am teaching right now. That is their problem, not the solution. With some practice in phonics (French version) and sounding out and accuracy, one of the girls has jumped a full grade level in reading over the Christmas holidays. The light bulb in the brain just clicked on. The other is still fighting but we have hope.

You ask how I can teach without sight words? Simple. Sound out everything. Everything, period. If a word uses a rule the kid hasn’t formally learned yet, model the sounding out for them and mention the pattern on the side. By the time you teach that rule formally, the kid will be pretty familiar with it and learn it faster. If a word has some irregularly pronounced letters, note them; make up a silly spelling pronunciation and compare it to the real pronunciation - this also teaches spelling. In writing, accept phonetic attempts at spelling until the word is learned formally in reading.

Flash cards for speed test a particular kind of visual memory which many many people just don’t have. The use of these flash cards for speed goes back to some very faulty research in the 1930’s and 1940’s. It was claimed that good readers don’t subvocalize — absolutely false, we all subvocalize, just so subtly that 1940’s equipment couldn’t measure it. It was claimed that good readers could recognize a word in a couple of milliseconds and that this was faster than they could possibloy fixate their eyes on the separate letters, so they couldn’t possibly be analyzing the words phonetically — only partially true, as it turns out from more recent research that most people can fixate on groups of letters, and those of us who are trained to do so can visualize the word in short term memory and analyze it there.

Also in the 1930’s and 1940’s there were some very faulty psychological theories popular in academic circles - theories that babies should not be touched or picked up, theories that children should be locked alone in their rooms at night, theories that cow’s milk was better for children and that breast-feeding was unhealthy and made babies too dependent — if you don’t believe those theories, propounded by the same people, why should you believe their reading theories?? The reading theories of the time held that children should read exactly like adults. Adults can recognize a word in a millisecond flash, so children should be trained with flash cards (false). Adults do not vocalize when reading, so children should be taught that subvocalizing is a sin. (false) Adults mostly read silently to themselves, so children should be taught to read silently from the beginning and never out loud except for a performance (very false!). My grandmother could tell you this was all nonsense — she said so at the time and she taught a lot of kids how to read, with phonics. Modern research has proved that grandma was right.

In fact, I happen to be one of the fastest readers I know, and a wonderful article “How Fast Are the World’s Best Readers” told me I’m close to the fastest around. But I never learned any sight words! How does this contradiction work? Well, if you really learn to look at words left to right and letter by letter and you practice it all the time, you get faster and better all the time. On the other hand, if you memorize words by sight until your memory bank is full to bursting and your retrieval becomes inaccurate, and you learn word analysis after the fact as a last resort reading method, then every word you read requires a multi-tier process of recognition - check against hundreds in the memory bank - context and pictures - memorized spellings - oh yeah, phonics — then you are obviously going to be slower.

Mary, ignore this test and teach your daughter to analyze each and every word. Habit and practice will make her faster. And the visual memory improves with practice. You can do things like air writing and visualizing the mental blackboard (or page or computer screen) to help it along.

In fact, I’m fairly slow at reading and copying numbers and have a tendency to reversals and omissions (despite which I have an Honours BA in math …) I do quite poorly when numbers are flashed on a screen, have a limited digit span, and I find it fatiguing and stressful. When I had pneumonia ten years ago and was severely fatigued, I found it very frustrating that I could not even remember a telephone number given orally - my digit span had dropped below seven. I had to train myself to have a pen handy and copy the numbers as the operator said them.

But I am a very good and extremely fast reader, and I read entirely by phonics methods. A combination of the meaning of the words and good phonics skills hides my relatively weak tracking and my reversals.

Please see my other note below for some further thoughts on this.

it is now two years later and my daughter reads on a beginning 7th grade level. We did a lot of what you advised, but we also put her through PACE, which I think did a lot to improve her speed of visual processing — especially visual sequencing skills. And, of course, we did a lot of reading out loud and discussion to develop her vocabulary and comprehension — all of which paid off when her decoding skills finally caught up.

Mary

but it doesn’t jive well with our experience. For example, she was able to read these same kinds of words in text — easily.

I think the big difference was that in the test she had to read the word in a very limited amount of time. With text, she could spend the extra milliseconds — or whatever she needed — to visually discriminate the word before applying her decoding skills.

The big thing is that, while she did PACE, she was doing no work at all on decoding skills. We had dropped PG entirely, and weren’t even having her read out loud every day at that point. (Frankly speaking, we were pretty worn out with everything, and decided for awhile to concentrate on PACE to get our money’s worth out of it. We didn’t do anything else during those three months, except piano lessons.) Yet, 6 weeks into PACE, her reading fluency showed dramatic improvement. PACE does not work on decoding skills or reading at all. That’s what leads me to believe it really was a visual processing problem. I also think it was a problem with sequencing, because of her experience with not being able to recite the alphabet in order, even at age 8.

It’s possible also that there is a problem with processing symbols, as opposed to processing graphic material. For example, she seems to have no problem at all with geometry, but fractions threw her for a loop (and I am anticipating major problems with algebra). Anything graphic she can manipulate mentally — tangrams are a breeze. Anything symbolic in math, especially if it involves sequences, is difficult for her (such as two-digit multiplication).

With written music, also, there seems to be the same problem, and written notes are symbols of the keys on the piano.

Anyway, at least with my daughter, there seems to be a whole complex of related problems. If decoding skills had been the only deficiency to start with, we wouldn’t still be having major difficulties with spelling and, to a lesser extent, math. Maybe it wasn’t visual memory, but it also wasn’t just insecure decoding.

Mary

Everything I’ve read from you on this board makes sense.

I’m just backing you up and suggesting you can go even further away from the standard, based as it is on faulty research and tradition.

As I’ve mentioned several times in reply to you and Rod, I’m more than familiar with visual and sequencing problems, coming from a family with a hereditary something-or-other that gives us all visual problems and odd coordination and sequencing/time problems. Doesn’t slow us down a bit mentally, but we all have a number of coping skills. Some of us do better in school than others, mostly depending on the style of the school at the time - we do well with reasonable structure and terribly with unfocused and erratic programs.

Having lived a visual and sequencing problem for fifty years and coped with it through advanced math and language studies, I recommend three things — train as much as you can (the idea of focusing solely on the PACE was probably the best thing at the time, of course for a limited time); maintain reasonable structure - not a rigid schedule, but a pattern and order; and be patient with erratic development - many things will come with time even if much later than usual.

In my personal case, figure-ground and the ability to do kindergarten-level find-the-turtles puzzles came in my twenties after a lot of art instruction, ability to recognize faces came a little (still not well, but a little) in my thirties, ability to type with six fingers in my thirties, ability to handwrite at all four years after the ability to read, ability to handwrite at any speed and at a normal size less than an inch high in my teens, ability to remember a schedule in my forties (and yes I taught school for several years without being able to remember a schedule, but I read well …)

Been there and done that so I say two things that really aren’t contradictory: be patient, but work hard and have high expectations. Something you do now and fight with may bear fruit years later.

Victoria,

For my son, at least, it is the combination of problems that is deadly. You were able to compenstate because you had other strengths. I can say the same for me. I am quite weak auditorially but I have strong visual skills. I learned to read without instruction at 4. I also read very very fast.

My son has both visual and auditory processing problems. It is truly a double whammy.

Beth

I started a new thread on this topic with my thoughts. Have you heard of a tachistoscope?
Donna in MO