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Visual Memory: 3 Important Reasons Why It Matters

Visual memoryVisual memory involves storing and retrieving previously experienced visual sensations and perceptions when the stimuli that originally evoked them are no longer present. That is, the person must be capable of making a vivid visual image in his mind of the stimulus, such as a word, and once that stimulus is removed, be able to visualise or recall this image without help.

Various researchers have stated that as much as eighty percent of all learning occurs through the eye, with visual memory as a crucial aspect of learning.

Critical for reading, spelling, and writing

Visual memory is a critical factor in reading, spelling, and writing. Children who have not developed their visual memory skills cannot readily reproduce a sequence of visual stimuli.

They frequently experience difficulty remembering the overall visual appearance of words or the letter sequence for reading and spelling. They may remember the letters of a word but often cannot remember their order, or they may know the initial letter and configuration of the word without having absorbed the details, that is, the subsequent letters of the word.

As a result, these children fail to develop a good sight vocabulary and frequently experience serious spelling difficulties.

Significantly related to maths performance

One hundred seventy-one children with a mean age of 10.08 years participated in a study by Kulp et al. This study was designed to determine whether or not performance on tests of visual perception could predict the children with poor current achievement in mathematics.

Visual perception refers to the process of interpreting and organizing visual information. Visual perceptual skill is often subdivided into areas such as visual discrimination and visual memory. Visual discrimination involves the ability to attend to and identify a figure’s distinguishing features and details, such as shape, orientation, colour, and size.

Controls for age and verbal cognitive ability were included in all regression analyses because the failure to control for verbal ability has been a criticism of some literature investigating the relationship between visual and academic skills.

Kulp et al. concluded: “Poor visual perceptual ability is significantly related to poor achievement in mathematics, even when controlling for verbal cognitive ability. Therefore, visual perceptual ability, and particularly visual memory, should be considered to be amongst the skills that are significantly related to mathematics achievement.” 

Role of visual memory in maths confirmed

A study (2013) by Dr. Dénes Szűcs and colleagues from the University of Cambridge set out to compare various potential theories of dyscalculia in more than a thousand 9-year-old children.

Dyscalculia is a severe maths learning difficulty affecting roughly 6 percent of schoolchildren. These children show normal intelligence, and their reading skills may be perfect. Dyscalculia is often described as “like dyslexia, but for maths.”

Children with dyscalculia often have difficulty understanding numerical quantities. For example, they find it challenging to connect abstract symbols, such as numbers, to the numerical magnitude they represent. They can’t see the connection, for instance, between five fingers and the number ‘5’.

Children with dyscalculia may also have trouble memorising maths tables, counting or skip counting in sequence, and telling time. In addition, they may struggle with basic addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division concepts, often needing to rely on alternative methods to solve problems (counting on fingers, drawing diagrams, etc.).

The researchers found that children with dyscalculia showed poor visual-spatial memory performance. For example, they performed poorly when they had to remember the locations of items in a spatial grid.

In addition, dyscalculic children’s ability to resist distraction from irrelevant information was also weak. For example, on a task where they had to choose which of two animals was larger in real life, they performed poorly when the real-life larger animal was smaller in its display size.

The findings challenge the notion that dyscalculia is characterised by problems with a specialised ‘number sense’ because number sense was intact in this sample of children with dyscalculia.

Edublox improves visual memory

Edublox offers multisensory brain-training programs that enable learners to overcome learning obstacles and reach their full potential.

Edublox is founded on pedagogical research and 30+ years of experience demonstrating that weak underlying foundational skills account for most learning difficulties. Underlying foundational skills include visual memory. Specific brain-training exercises can strengthen these weaknesses leading to increased performance in reading, spelling, writing, math, and learning.

In one research study, Edublox improved visual memory by 1.3 years in 5 days. Chiropractor Dr. Jaidan Mays compared the effects of Edublox training versus Edublox training combined with cervical spinal manipulative therapy on visual memory and visual sequential memory.

Thirty-four Grade 5, 6, and 7 learners from an inner-city school participated in Mays’s study. Two subtests of the Test of Visual Perceptual Skills were used to assess the learners’ visual memory and sequential memory. They were then divided into two equal groups.

The members of the first group (the Edublox Group) did Edublox for 22.5 hours for five days. The members of the second group (the Edublox and Adjustment Group) received the same Edublox training as the first group; the second group also received cervical adjustment therapy every morning. The assessment was repeated after five days.

The results: The mean Visual Memory Skills Test POST score across both groups was significantly higher than the mean Visual Memory Skills Test PRE score. The mean score across both groups improved from 6.2 years to 7.5 years. As the graph below illustrates, the Edublox Group improved slightly more than the Edublox and Adjustment Group (an improvement from 6.3 to 7.8 years versus an improvement from 6.2 to 7.1 years):
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Graph.

If you suspect that your child has a visual memory problem, contact your closest Edublox branch for an assessment and help.

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