Ophthalmic disorder may affect visuo-attentional performance in childhood

Abstract

The aim of this study was to explore the visuo-attentional skills of children with an ophthalmic disorder. Twenty-four patients and 60 healthy controls between the ages 4 and 7 years, all right-handed with normal or corrected-to-normal close visual acuity, were divided into four age groups. Patients' diagnoses included refractive disorders (e.g., myopia, hypermetropia), strabismus, amblyopia, cataract, and nystagmus. All participants performed nine paper-and-pencil visuospatial tasks aiming to assess selective attention (cancellation tasks), spatial working memory (symbol orientation task), fine visual analysis (embedded figures test), and simple perceptual analysis (shape-matching task). In healthy children, the results showed that performance on all visuo-attentional tasks improved with age. While perception, orientation of attention, and visual working memory develop by the time children begin school (age 5), more sophisticated abilities such as attention disengagement and motor control continue to develop during late childhood. Moreover, a spatial bias in attention orienting appeared with reading acquisition (6–7 years). In ophthalmic children, at 4 years of age defects were observed in all assessed functions, but at 7 years an attentional deficit was virtually the only one remaining. Overall, the results demonstrate that children with an ophthalmologic disorder may experience difficulties with visuospatial tasks despite corrected-to-normal visual acuity.

Keywords:

• Children
• Ophthalmologic disease
• Attention
• Visual analysis
• Development

Acknowledgments

This research was supported by the Edmond and Benjamin de Rothschild Foundations (Geneva, Switzerland and New York, USA) and by the French Health Ministry (Grant from the Direction Générale de la Santé, Paris, France). The second author, MV, was supported by a MNERT grant attributed to Pierre Mendès-France University, Grenoble, France.

Notes

¹ Although the 7-year-old control group included 7 girls and 8 boys while the ophthalmic group included only boys, no statistical difference was observed between those groups regarding sex distribution (chi-square test = 3.59, df = 1, p = .058; After Yates correction: chi-square test = 1.83, df = 1, p = .176). Although this may be surprising, the small size of our ophthalmic group (n = 5) contributed to this phenomenon (the control group being three times larger than the ophthalmic group: n = 15 vs. n = 5).