Behavioural Optometry
Visual and Motor Development
Vision and early motor development (movement) are intimately connected and play a vital and reciprocal role in general child development.
In the newborn infant limb and body (and eye) movements are undifferentiated (random, uncoordinated and segmented). Through the process of learning to roll and sit and eventually walk an infant gains control of his limbs, head and body. In order to balance for sitting and walking an infant must organise his body movements around the force of GRAVITY. The weight of gravity upon his body helps him develop a sense of orientation or position in space relative to GRAVITY. Through the process of organising his body movements around gravity the infant develops an internalised knowledge of his body parts and how they interrelate. He learns where he ends and the outside world begins. He develops body spatial schemes, such as top and bottom. These are then projected out into space as references for visual spatial organisation with himself at the centre of all his spatial judgements and interpretations.
Good spatial organisation is essential for interpretation, if we are to make sense of any input to the visual system. Likewise, in order to communicate visual information to others, or to learn from others, we must have references that we all can understand. It is easy to see that good spatial organisation would be required to describe the best route to a particular destination or in explaining where you have placed something. The ability to represent space on paper (drawing) or in our minds (dreaming, thinking, remembering, imagination) relies on the same spatial organisation. Think about talking someone through a golf swing or a website or describing a painting or a plan of action (movements through time).
So understanding visual space, and particularly WHERE things are in space, is dependent upon early body movement through space and orientation or equilibrium relative to gravity. And this is just as important for orientation and spatial arrangement of letters as it is for navigation around obstacles in space.