Learning Disorders

Symptoms of dyslexia include reversing the position of letters or mixing up similar shaped letters, difficulty with phonological awareness, poor reading comprehension, poor spelling, difficulty with copying notes from the board, and delayed speech. In vision therapy, we can improve your visual discrimination, spatial relations (laterality and directionality), and visual memory to reduce the frequency of dyslexia symptoms. Also eliminating any binocular vision disorder is important for dsylexia treatment.

Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) affects a person's ability to pay attention. Since the majority of binocular vision disorders can cause visual discomfort that can lead to avoidance of tasks such as reading, writing, studying, and/or computer work, there is a large connection between ADHD and binocular vision disorder symptoms. In vision therapy we work to improve the underlying binocular vision disorder to improve endurance of visual activity which can then effectively improve ADHD symptoms. 

Dyscalculia is a learning disability that affects math skills including calculations, math concepts, and solving math problems. In vision therapy, we can improve math-related visual perception and visual information processing skills such as visual discrimination, and visual and sequential memory to improve your math skills. Ensuring proper eye muscle alignment, focusing ability, and eye movements are also  needed for math success. 

Dysgraphia is a learning disability that affects one's writing skills. This can look like poor spelling, poor handwriting, or trouble putting your thoughts on paper. Our optometrists can test for deficient "grapho-motor" skills that may be related to this learning disability. Common symptoms would include poor pencil grip/writing, poor organization on written pages, and poor copying/spacing. 

Dyspraxia is an disorder that affects your ability to plan and coordinate movement and affect both gross and fine motor control including balance and coordination, which can interfere with your hand-eye coordination. This disorder can lead to poor spatial relations (laterality and directionality) which can be related to dyslexia. Our fine motor skills can affect our eyes' alignment system and eye tracking system. Poor gross motor control can also affect sport performance. Through vision therapy, we can address these areas of concern. 

Disorders in auditory and visual processing can cause difficulty in processing information from both sound and sight. Our optometrists can test for deficiencies in this area. Common symptoms include poor direction following, poor tempo/rhythm/pacing and/or poor phonics. This type of deficiency can not only affect students, but also musicians. ADHD is highly correlated with auditory and visual processing disorders due to the high overlap in common symptoms.

Executive functioning is mental skills that help us plan, focus our attention, remember instructions, and multitask. This skill is important for organizing, prioritizing, and completing tasks. This skill is a necessity for everyone for almost everything that we do in life. Many visual information processing skills are used when maintaining executive function and underlying binocular vision disorders can also disrupt our executive function.