Binocular Status / Visual Skills
The visual skills that form our binocular vision status are: oculomotor, vergences, accommodation and depth perception. Your brain must control these skills easily to create a single, clear image. The visual skills should be strong enough to read, do computer work or other similar activities, for long periods of time without getting tired. When the eyes do not work together tasks that should be easy become more difficult.
We evaluate over 17 different visual skills that are required for reading and learning to give a complete picture of how your brain controls your eyes. We have simplified and grouped the results into the following 4 main categories:
Oculomotor Skills:
Eye tracking is the planning and execution of eye movements used to follow a moving target or look from one object to another. Sufficient skills in this area reflect the proper development of vision becoming the “leading sense”. When a person gains comfortable control of their eye movements at an early age, they are laying the proper foundation for more sophisticated eye movements, such as, following a ball in sports or carrying the eyes across a line of print when reading.
Vergence System:
Our brain takes the image that each eye sees and puts them together to form a single, clear image. When the brain struggles to do this, a person will have a variety of problems such as an eye turning in or turning out (strabismus), double vision (words doubling up or “moving” on the page), suppression (the turning off of the vision in one eye), fatigue, headaches, eye aches, poor comprehension, poor depth perception and distance judgements and avoidance of close work. In addition, one could also have difficulty paying attention to while attempting to read, learn, or work.
Accommodation:
Our eyes need to change focus quickly and effortlessly so we can shift from looking at things up close to seeing things clearly far away. This is required for moving our eyes from looking at deskwork to seeing the board in the classroom. Inadequate focusing ability can lead to requiring excessive time to complete assignments, blurring of print, fatigue, headaches and eye aches, avoiding close work and poor comprehension.
Depth Perception:
When both eyes work together to combine the images seen from each other to form a single 3-D image. Depth perception makes it possible for the eyes to judge distances, where an object is in relation to other objects, and to tell if something is near to us or far away. Problems with depth perception can include: clumsiness and the inability to see in 3D, riding a bike, driving a car, pouring milk, walking up or down stairs and even stepping off the curb.
Visual Information Processing (VIP)
Visual processing skills enable us to begin to understand the visual information sent from the eyes to the brain. This is required in order for a person to identify what they are seeing and thus, understand the world in which we live.
We evaluate over 9 different visual processing skills that are required for reading and learning to give a complete picture of how your brain begins to understand the information sent to it through your eyes. We have simplified and grouped the results into the following main categories:
Basic Processes:
How well we can recognize an item, remember it and tell it apart from other similar looking items.
Sequencing:
How well we can remember a sequence of information, such as the letter arrangement in a word.
Complex Processes:
How well we can identify items when surrounded by other, unrelated items (such as identifying a word in a paragraph when reading, versus by itself when learning how to spell), and, how well we can identify an item when some of the details are hidden from us (can your brain fill in the proper details?).
Overall Visual Perception:
A single score that compares your ability to the ability of other people your age
Word Recognition
Ability to recognize printed words accurately and efficiently.