Library Dissertation Showcase

An exploration into the prevalence and effects of cerebral vision impairments (CVI) in primary and secondary school children

  • Year of Publication:
  • 2022

Throughout our life vision is a key part of daily activities. It drives social interactions and recognition and navigation of changing and different environments. Never is the development of these skills so important as in children (Chokron et al., 2020). Cerebral Visual Impairments (CVI) can lead to disorders of cognitive and social development that can manifest a range of visual and perceptual deficits that may be contributory to their disorder and impact academic attainment and mental health (Pease et al.,2021). Despite the growing concern in the field, the exact prevalence is, as yet, unknown (McDowell, 2021). The estimated prevalence ranges from 0.1% to 0.4% but it is expected that these figures in practice are much higher (Gilbert et al., 1999; Philip & Dutton, 2014). If this is the case, many children may be struggling without any form of intervention to support them. One reason for unknown prevalence is the lack of wide-scale testing in research (Chokron et al., 2020). Therefore, this study aims to assess the feasibility of conducting a wide-scale investigation into the prevalence and effects of CVI in school-aged children. The study recruited 31 participants, parents were asked to complete two questionnaires on their child’s behalf, then, children completed a series of visual search tasks to assess the child’s visual ability and accuracy. The results demonstrated that parental reports strongly correlated with the child’s visual performance suggesting that this study can be used in the future to accurately discriminate between children with CVI and those without. The results also demonstrate the differences in reaction times across pop-out and conjunction tasks as well as the impact age can have on visual search performance demonstrating the trend commonly seen in children’s development of attention and perception (Waddington et al., 2021).

PLEASE NOTE: You must be a member of the University of Lincoln to be able to view this dissertation. Please log in here.