Visual Attention: Key to Building the Internal Compass
Julia Grover-Barrey OTR/L
Founder of In-Tuned®
Visual attention is key to my work with students, so I am writing about it again.
It is one of the first things I work on with students. It is foundational to our working together in a way that will stick…not just going through the motions.
Progress in other skill areas hinge on progress in visual attention.
When students have difficulty with visual attention, they have difficulty with top-down processing, which is “attention control that is driven by factors ‘internal’ to the observer.” (Gaspelin and Luck. Top-down Does Not Mean “Voluntary”. Journal of Cognition. 2018;1(1):25)
Many students lack the internal compass for attentional control; they are at the mercy of external stimuli in the surrounding environment.
The less In-Tuned® the internal compass, the more difficulty the student is going to have with sensory processing or the perceiving, receiving, filtering, sorting, interpreting, acting on and storing of input from the outside world, as well as interoception, or the interpretation of internal sensations influencing behavior.
Work on visual attention, while bringing in other competing sensory elements, a piece at a time, is key to dialing in and refining the internal compass. I refer to these techniques as sensory pairing. The combining of visual attention with proprioceptive, tactile, auditory and kinetic input while adjusting level of difficulty.
Please join me on September 29th, 2021 from 5:30-6:30 pm MST for a FREE In-Tuned® Open Forum to discuss ocular motor skills development and more on the importance of visual attention.