Vision and its Role in Learning

 Recognising that vision, may be a contributing factor to a child’s difficulty with learning, depends on the Model of Vision that the individual optometrist and parent has.
If the parent thinks that eyesight is the only important aspect of vision and reports to the optometrist that they have not had any complaints about vision by the child, the optometrist may perform a routine test to evaluate how clearly the child sees in the distance, check that they are not too long-sighted, short-sighted or have astigmatism and then check the health of the eyes.

But if the parent understands that Vision is the sensori-motor system that guides movement and orchestrates the senses in our exploration and then conceptual understanding of the world, then so much more needs to be evaluated.

At its most fundamental level, aspects of vision are normally broken down into the following groups:
• Eye fixation.
• Eye focusing.
• Eye teaming (binocular vision).
• Visual perceptual skills.

Fixation is the ability to direct and maintain steady, central visual attention on a target. This basic skill is developed in infancy and refined through the early years.

Ocular motor skills are the neuro-muscular control skills developed to point the visual system on target and move it to either follow a moving target (pursuit eye movements), or jump from one object to another (saccadic eye movements). The infant moves from an initial reflexive movement using most of the body towards using the head to guide the visual system.

During the next few years the individual refines this movement system by learning to use eye muscles to replace head movement – an achievement important in visual readiness for school.
Without these skills, you can’t move your eyes smoothly across a line of text on a page.
Scanning from letter to letter, word to word, looking ahead and predicting text, and moving from one line to the next are all complex eye movements involved in the task of reading.

If an individual has difficulty controlling eye movements they could often lose their place when reading, frequently guess words rather than recognise them, need to use their finger to maintain their place, or exhibit other more subtle difficulties in visual information processing. Most commonly these difficulties interfere with “learning to read.”

Eye Teaming (Binocular Fusion and Stereo Depth Perception) is the ability to co-ordinate and align the eyes precisely so that the brain can fuse the images from each eye as we look from place to place along a plane (such as when we are reading) or look from distance to near.
This skill has both a sensory and motor aspect. The sensory aspect is the brain’s ability to put what each eye sees together. Even a slight misalignment causes difficulty with reduced attention and stamina for visual tasks, particularly reading.

Misalignment causes double vision or suppression of part of the vision of one eye, making precise tasks more tiring and often follows with avoidance of the task.
If words looked like this, would reading be fun? Would you have to rest your eyes?

Focusing Skills is the ability to accurately focus and maintain clarity at a particular point (a word on a page) and the ability to rapidly change focus from one point to another (copying from the board to the book).

This combined lens neuro-muscular system is a network integrating the eyes and the brain.
Most children are capable of a large amount of change in focus, but fine, accurate control breaks down more easily under stress.

by Richard Shanks,
Optometrist

About the author:
With a particular interest in the impact that visual difficulties have on learning in school, Richard Shanks, Optometrist, has consistently strived to keep up-to-date on the clinical advancements and understanding that optometry has to offer children struggling to learn.
In 1990 he joined the College of Optometric Vision Development (COVD), which is an organisation that has an interest in the visual performance and how it interacts with the academic and sporting potential of individuals, together with their quality of life.
In 1991 he became a Member of the Optometric Extension Program which is a non-profit organisation promoting the understanding of the development of vision throughout both childhood and adulthood.
In 1992 he was invited to work under Prof. Harry Wachs in the Reading Centre of the George Washington University in Washington DC, who he worked with and studied under several times over the next few years.
Since returning to Barry and Sargent Optometrists in NZ he has completed the Certificate of Ocular Pharmacology at Auckland University in 1997 and the Behavioural Optometry Masters Paper at the University of New South Wales in Australia 1999.
He has continued his studies under the Australasian College of Behavioural Optometry and has finished his Fellowship for the College, by publishing a standardised test of visual spatial thinking for children between six and 10 years of age. He has recently retired from the Regional Director’s role for the NZ Division of the Australasian College of Behavioural Optometry.