I looked up some things in Cathy’s post from last night.
Oculomotor apraxia (or ocular motor apraxia) isn’t a visual processing disorder. Apraxia is a condition where the person has difficulty making deliberate movements. Maria wants to move her eyes but the signals don’t always get from her brain to her eye muscles. Oculomotor apraxia affects only horizontal movements for some reason. Although that might be part of her problem, she certainly also has CVI.
One of her past speech therapists thought Maria had oralmotor apraxia, which is the same thing but would have to do with mouth movements and swallowing.
The test he was talking about is visual evoked response (VER) or visual evoked potential (VEP). It’s basically a special type of EEG during which they show Maria things like flashing lights or a black and white checkerboard which changes contrast. They measure how her brain responds to these fairly simple stimuli and can determine how much of the information is being processed. In fact Maria has gotten evoked response tests before – the BAER test for her hearing. There are several types of VEPs to test different things like color recognition or motion tracking.
My response to the convergence exercise is an exaggerated heavy sigh. Don’t get me wrong – I’m sure it will help. We’ll add it to the 20,000 other things we are supposed to do with her every day and don’t have time for.