Visual Motor Integration and Perception Skills
The relationship of perceptual abilities to performance and everyday tasks is subtle, but all-encompassing (Pratt, and Allen 1989, Trombly 1995). Assessing activities of daily living is the focus of Occupational Therapists, and numerous daily tasks rely heavily on visual perceptual abilities.
In many different contexts, it is an important skill to be able to separate objects from their surroundings in the visual field, e.g. letters and words must be separated from the rest of the page when reading and/or writing; driving skills rely on separating relevant visual information from other objects in the field of view and when judging the speed, distance and direction of moving objects etc.
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Visual perception plays a role when planning motor (movement) actions, when utilising a sequence of letters or numbers that are presented visually, e.g. when reading, writing or calculating, or when differentiating between representations of objects seen in various orientations. People with impaired visual perception can show deficits in reading, writing, meal preparation, independent feeding, dressing and recreational skills. (Saliba, Roger and Davis 2003: Maki, Voeten and Poskiparta 2001: Parush, Yochman, Cohen and Gershon 1998: Niestadt 1993).
