Causes of changes in Processing of Visual Information

Visual disability due to brain damage is a sum of

1. structural changes in and damage to the eyes and visual pathways that alter the quality of the visual information entering the brain,
2. damage to the ocular motor functions and/or
3. changes in the structures processing visual information in the brain^2,3,4.

All these changes need to be considered in the assessment of visual functioning and remembered when we discuss processing disorders because all three problems may simultaneously affect a child’s functioning. In the clinical and educational assessment it is useful to first think through all the possible causes of changes in image quality and ocular motor functions like fixation, saccades, convergence and also accommodation (which is often forgotten) when assessing vision for early intervention and education, especially for reading and mathematics before considering the specific sensory visual functions in these tasks.