The Center for Visual Management

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Intermediate Visual Examination

This is a comprehensive examination with additional testing to explore, in depth the patient’s specific eye movements. This type of examination is appropriate for patients with reading problems, headaches, eye fatigue, night and computer vision difficulties. It is also appropriate for children who suffer from reading troubles, concentration difficulties, and trouble with sports and balance.

Visual Perceptual Analysis

A visual perceptual analysis, as practiced at The Center for Visual Management is a study of performance in the triad of eye, mind, and body. The purpose of the procedural design is:

To measure and observe the efficiency level of performance in traditional and novel tasks.
To investigate the solutions in the individual response to conscious and unconscious constraints in behavior of posture, movement, organization, attention and thought.
To probe the established behavioral skews with performance enhancing lenses to answer the question “once inappropriate behavior becomes established, can it be modified or changed to a higher level of behavior?”

Extended Services

What Is Vision Therapy?

Vision training has a long history and evolving models for optometrists, ophthalmologists, educators, psychologists and occupational therapists. Vision training, as practiced at The Center for Visual Management recognizes the need of mind, body, and world to emerge as equal partners which elevate development, behavior, and performance of the individual to his/her highest level of proficiency.

We set the conditions for the patient to answer for themselves three questions:

Where am I?
Where is it?
What is it?

The therapy is complementary to a great optometric history and recognition that vision is a learned brain function. Procedures are designed based on neuro-physiology, levels of development, and psychology of the individual which are learned by experience, and can be changed by experience.

Vision therapy procedures are well based on three criteria:

What is the demand of the task?
Does the task have meaning to this particular patient?
Can this task lead to a higher level of proficiency?

Selecting the appropriate tasks for each patient and presenting them in a developmental sequence order, is both an art and science that requires knowledge of human development, physiology, and the psychological needs of the individual. Clinical judgment and experience, further allows practitioners to understand of the goals of the individual.

Vision therapy is more than just “fixing eyes.” In order to achieve a patient’s maximum potential, planning therapy programs should be guided by:Vision therapy is more than just “eye exercises” and the therapist cannot address vision in isolation, but rather must treat the person as a whole.

Movement is central to any therapy plan.
Vision therapy must be consistent with a patient’s ability and perceptual style.
Therapy moves through logical stages of awareness, attention and automicity.

He has a significant body of published research has been on ambient lenses and their role in the rehabilitation of individuals who display dysfunction in learning, emotion and autistic spectrum disorders.

His recently published book, Seeing Through New Eyes: Changing the Lives of Children with Autism, Aspergers Syndrome, and other Developmental Disabilities through Vision Therapy is now available for parents and professionals in the fields of autism, optometry and ophthalmology, psychology, education and occupational therapy who wish to explore a physiological model for managing the spectrum population

Visual Management of Autistic Spectrum Disorders

Most autistic individuals suffer from visual perceptual dysfunction. This is not to suggest that autistic people can not “see” in the traditional sense of the word; many autistic patients can demonstrate normal visual acuity, as measured by a standard eye chart test. Visual perception, however, involved far more than visual acuity; it is a process for receiving, integrating, and interpreting visual stimuli. A lack of integration between the visual and vestibular systems, or an inability to orient ones self in space and adapt to changes in the visual environment are examples of visual perceptual dysfunction. Visual perceptual dysfunction can produce symptoms of physiological and emotional disorders, as well autism.

It has been my clinical experience that visual therapy can reduce or eliminate visual perceptual dysfunction and improve the patient’s ability to function at school work and play. The first step in the process is identification of the problem, which necessitates treating the individual as a whole rather than focusing on the eyes as merely organs for site. This entails measuring the patients visual performance not only while sitting looking at a stationary object, but also while the patient is standing and moving and while the object is moving measuring peripheral vision and depth perception, and assessing the patients posture, mood and response to various visual tasks. This approach will reveal that the patients perceptual style; some patients fight to process visual information but others, including many autistic individuals, flee from processing visual stimuli and withdraw into themselves.

I have had success in treating such cases through the use of lenses, which transform light, in combination with visual exercises designed to enable the patient to process visual stimuli in an organized, integrated fashion. Such therapy can allow the patient to achieve harmony with their environment and reduce the panic responses to visual information, which are symptomatic of autism.

Common Visual Symptoms Associated                    Functional Vision Deficits
    With Autistic Spectrum Disorders
            Double Vision                                       Visual Field Loss
            Side Viewing                                        Strabismus (Eye turn)
            Toe Walking                                        Oculomotor Dysfunction                                                                            (Eye tracking deficit)
            Dizziness                                               Convergence (aiming) deficit
            Light Sensitivity                                    Accommodative (focusing) deficit
            Bumping into Objects                           Visual Perceptual Difficulties
            Spatial Disorientation                            Visual Memory Loss
            Poor Visual Attention                             Depth Perception Deficiency
            Hand Flapping                                      Abnormal Blink Rate
            Finger Flicking                                   Balance and Posture Difficulties
            Saccadic Eye Movements
            Lacking Eye Contact

Visual Management of Learning Disabilities and Cognitive Skills

Visual development should follow a sequential and/or orderly maturation, timing from perception to cognition. The former is unconscious and the latter is conscious knowledge. Binocular rivalry interferes with the unconscious movement and organization of the ‘where’ system of visual processing. When binocular rivalry interferes with the interaction of the visual system a child will exhibit delays in motor performance and learning abilities.

Visual processing is tightly linked to perceptual decision making. Visual processing delays will create difficulties in constructing and organizing a representation of the visual world, thus, interfering with decision making and cognitive creativity.

It is the role of visual management to first identify the level of visual processing dysfunction and second to design a program utilizing lenses and procedures to reorganize the neuro-physiology. The goal is a return to a sequential and orderly maturation of learning and cognition.

Visual Management of Affective, Emotional Behaviors

What’s vision got to do with it?

Joseph LeDoux believes that emotions and cognition are best thought of as separate but interacting mental functions mediated by separate but interactive brain systems. This model best explains the visual management of affective, emotional behaviors.

Developmental delays in our visual time/space interactions can trigger emotional reactions before the brains perceptual systems have fully processed the stimulus, thus affecting the perceptual representation and the evaluation of the object. These delays in representational processing in turn affect the storing and retrieval of memories, creating a significant emotional response at all levels of visual processing of a stimulus.

The role of visual management is to change the manifestation of these emotional behaviors through a series of growth, creating conscious awareness, to a level of relaxed attention and finally reflective performance a position in which the model works best and thus eliminating the physiological aspect of emotional behavior.