Assessment of visuo-attentional abilities in young children with or without visual disorder: toward a systematic screening in the general population.
A nine-game visuo-attentional packet can spot serious but hidden visual-processing disorders in preschoolers.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team built a nine-test visuo-attentional battery for preschoolers.
They gave it to kids with known visual problems and to kids in regular preschools.
The goal was to see if the tests could tell neurovisual disorders from common eye problems and catch missed cases.
What they found
The battery cleanly split neurovisual disorders from simple ophthalmology issues.
Seven children in the general preschool group had never been flagged before; the tests spotted them.
Overall, the tool showed positive screening power.
How this fits with other research
Huang et al. (2014) did the same kind of work for motor skills. They showed a computerized test can screen bilateral coordination problems in 4- to 6-year-olds with high accuracy.
Lemons et al. (2015) went one step further and proved that preschool visual-motor scores predict handwriting trouble in first grade. Céline et al. add the visuo-attentional piece earlier in the chain.
Tiadi et al. (2014) looked at older dyslexic readers and found slow, inaccurate vertical eye movements. Their data seem to clash because they report negative outcomes while Céline found positive screening utility. The gap closes when you note the ages: preschoolers versus elementary kids already labeled dyslexic. Early screen-and-support may prevent later saccade problems.
Why it matters
You now have a quick, low-tech way to flag visuo-attentional red flags before reading instruction starts. Pair it with the motor and handwriting screens shown in the neighbor studies and you get a full pre-academic picture. If a child fails the visuo tests, refer early instead of waiting for reading failure.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
In young children, visual attention, analysis or memory is only rarely evaluated. Moreover, tools to test for such higher-order visual capacities in children are limited. In an attempt to develop and refine such tools, we selected nine tests to assess visuo-attentional abilities before formal reading education (grade 1). The battery consisted of gaze fixation, visual field, visual extinction, binocular visual pursuit, visual memory, "A" cancellation, Teddy bears cancellation, embedded figures, and matching tasks. This battery was used in the general population (n=110) to calculate cut-off scores identifying the lower 5% of the general population to obtain a screening measure for neurovisual disabilities in children. To evaluate our battery's sensitivity and specificity to neurovisual disorders over ophthalmological diseases, a neurovisual group (n=9) and an ophthalmologic group (n=13) also completed the tests. Overall, all but three tests of the battery could be used to discriminate between neurovisual and ophthalmologic children. The ophthalmologic children failed the visual field extent examination and the cancellation tasks, consistent with deleterious effects of ophthalmologic disease on visual perception as well as higher-order vision. Using the cut-off scores, the battery identified only 2 out of 13 ophthalmologic patients, but 5 out of 9 neurovisual patients. In the general population, these cut-off scores identified seven children. These children were previously undiagnosed with any disability (i.e., no diagnosis of ophthalmological, neurological, or psychiatric disease) and thus did not receive any rehabilitation. This preliminary study highlights the necessity for a neurovisual disorder screening tool for young children.
Research in developmental disabilities, 2010 · doi:10.1016/j.ridd.2010.03.006