Workshop 3: Wednesday September 10th 2014 9.30am – 4.30pm (Cost £95)

Can you believe your eyes? Understanding visual perceptual and visual spatial difficulties after brain injury.

Professor Barbara A Wilson and Dr Anita Rose

Perception is the process of integrating information we receive from our senses, or in other words, making sense of what we see, hear, touch, smell or taste. Adequate sensory functioning is a prerequisite for normal perception but impairment at the sensory level cannot be described as a perceptual problem.We would not, therefore, regard a blind person as having a visual perceptual deficit or a deaf person as having an auditory perceptual problem: instead, we recognise that they have sensory impairments.

It is, of course, possible for both sensory and perceptual difficulties to coexist but we cannot assess perceptual abilities when severe sensory impairment exists in the same modality. We can distinguish between early visual processing disorders and higher visual recognition disorders. Among the former are problems recognising differences in size or shape. Among the latter are problems recognising objects, colours and faces.

We begin the workshop with a brief description of some of the early visual processing disorders and how to assess these. Of particular interest to the presenters of this workshop are the higher visual perceptual disorders faced by survivors of brain injury. It is easy to misunderstand and misdiagnose these.

We will discuss:

  1. Two forms of visual object agnosia (failure to recognise objects) namely apperceptive and associative agnosia
  2. Two forms of prosopagnosia (failure to recognise faces) namely apperceptive and associative
  3. Balint’s Syndrome (an inability to localise in space)
  4. Four types of topographical disorientation (difficulty in finding one’s way around) namely egocentric disorientation, heading disorientation, landmark agnosia and anterograde disorientation
  5. Unilateral neglect (failure to attend to, respond to or report stimuli on one side of space. The workshop will be illustrated with case presentations and video clips.

Participants are encouraged to discuss their own experiences with patients whose deficits are hard to understand.

Objectives of the workshop

Participants will:-

  1. Be introduced to the typical visual perceptual and visual spatial problems faced by survivors of non-progressive brain injury
  2. Be familiar with some of the assessment procedures used to determine visual deficits
  3. Understand which questions these assessments can and cannot answer.
  4. Learn about environmental modifications that can enable those with very severe problems to survive with visual perceptual deficits
  5. Discover some of the aids available to help people compensate for their problems

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