| Abstrakt: |
This article comments on researcher Nathan Flax's paper on the eye and other learning disabilities published in the May 1973 issue of the "Journal of Learning Disabilities." According to the author, Flax is silent on ocular abnormalities that really are commonly found in children with reading problems, namely dominance patterns that are crossed or not firmly established, immaturity or distortions of visual perception, impaired eye-hand coordination, and accommodative weakness. Dominance and perception are not strictly ocular abnormalities, but complex neurological functions. Accommodative weakness, like convergence weakness, is a frequent finding in retarded readers, but both respond to simple exercises and are not causative factors in the problem. Even impaired visual perception is not a cause of the reading problem, but merely a manifestation of the abnormal functioning of the child's learning mechanism. As far as optometric vision training is concerned, there is need to study comparative groups of children, giving the routine training to one half and a similar appearing but reverse mechanism training to the other half. |
