BrainGoGo: Visual Perception

Visual Perception

Visual perception, which mainly refers to a child’s ability to process and organize visual information from the environment, is a core part of a child’s cognitive development, and particularly it relates to their reading and writing abilities.

Various abilities are important to a child’s visual abilities; this includes Eyeball control, Form Constancy, and Spatial Relationship. In many cases, they are closely related to not only to writing but also problem solving and conceptual skills required for higher level science and math. With good training, these abilities can be improved.

Eyeball Control

Eyeball control demands a child to focus, follow and pick up objects at various distances, with different backgrounds. There are two major abilities.

Pursuit

The ability to follow a moving object without turning one’s head.

Saccade

The ability to performance a visual search by fast eye movement on a picture.

Form Constancy

Form Constancy refers to the ability to mentally manipulate forms and visualize the resulting outcomes. Usually, children this ability should be able:

Distinguish differences in size, shape, and orientation.
Recognizing everyday objects when put in unusual positions or are a different size

Children with poor form-constancy may frequently reverse letters and numbers, such as writing “b” instead of “d”.

Spatial Relationship

Spatial relationship refers to the way a child perceives space and their position or orientation within that space can affect their gross motor skills and classroom performance. It is the ability to distinguish differences among similar objects or forms. This skill helps children in understanding relationships and recognizing underlying concepts.
This area is closely related to writing Chinese, which requires children to understand how different parts of a character to be arranged.

Among others, Spatial relationship and (Eye) Pursuit are two important areas, and we hope we offer you some help.

Pursuit Practice : Rainbow Slide

In “Rainbow Slide”, the children’s eyes follow moving objects. By doing this activity on pursuit eye movement, children’s visual perceptual skills are developed and their ocular motor control enhanced. Other benefits of this practice include:

Enabling children to read the whole sentence written from left to right, without turning their heads or bodies.
Improving children’s reading speed.
Helping children in daily activities such as throwing and catching items, and ball games.

Visual Spatial Relationship Exercise Butterfly Kaleidoscope

“Butterfly Kaleidoscope” is an activity based on visual-spatial relationships, in which the children get familiarized with the spatial relationship between two or more objects. This enhances their spatial judgment and helps them to write neat Chinese characters with correct arrangements of the components. In addition, this exercise is helpful in the following ways:

Distinguishing the positions of left and right, top and bottom, inside and outside.
Avoiding mixing up the positions of the left and right components, for example, the Chinese characters (部) and (陪).
Helping children to grasp the proportion of the components in Chinese characters, for instance, 1:1 proportion (林 - wood), one-third proportion (樹 - tree), or even differences in length and width (棍 - rod).
Good spatial perception skills help with keeping handwriting within boxes or on straight lines. Every day, we draw on spatial perception skills when estimating certain areas, finding our way and remembering how to get places.
Every day, we draw on spatial perception skills when estimating certain areas, finding our way and remembering how to get place.