Visual-Spatial Dyslexia

The visual-spatial dyslexic, generally speaking, has problems remembering and discriminating visual gestalts. Mattis noted difficulties in visual-spatial perception and letter discrimination. Pirozzolo characterized such a child as having directional (left-right) confusions, poor visual-motor coordination with lower scores in performance areas, body concept disorders, finger agnosia, spatial dyscalculia, and poor visual imagery causing reversals and form confusions. Boder observed that children with these types of difficulties are audile learners, that is, they usually adopt a phonetic analytic rather than whole-word approach to reading, and Johnson and Myklebust noted their preference for auditory activities.

Some of the specific manifestations ascribed to this group of dyslexics, according to author Saroj D. Sutaria (Specific Learning Disabilities: Nature and Needs), include the following: visual discrimination difficulties, slow rate of perception, visual sequencing difficulties, visual memory disorders, deficits in visual analysis and synthesis, omissions, additions and substitutions, and losing place while reading.