Visual encoding in psychology
When a child is unable to remember a word from sentence to sentence, challenges with encoding (putting sounds together to make a word) and decoding (breaking the word down into component sounds) are very likely to be the underlying processing problems. Learning Disabilities: A number of processing challenges may contribute to a learning disability in reading or dyslexia. Sometimes, an attention deficit may account for challenges learning to read. Academic performance below age and grade level in school may indicate a learning disability. A learning disability is a weakness in a certain academic subject, like reading or writing, while often other academic areas are not impacted. Often, these challenges indicate that a learning disability is present. Possible deficits include a phonological processing deficit, a phonemic awareness deficit, a phonological memory deficit or challenges with encoding and decoding. It may be that your child cannot recall the visual image of the word ‘mother.’ Difficulties could be related to trouble recognizing letters, letter blends and sounds. Reading is crucial to success in school so this problem represents a significant challenge.ĭifficulty with visual encoding of information could be related to visual memory. The classroom teacher may talk about special reading groups or about enrolling your child in tutoring for reading. Your child may try to avoid reading all together, or he or she may insist on being read to instead of reading independently. Visual memory and encoding challenges may go hand in hand with phonological memory challenges, meaning that it is hard to remember how words look visually (visual encoding) and how words sound (phonological memory). The child may ‘hit a wall,’ have meltdowns, yell and refuse. Your child may say, “I’m stupid” or “I can’t read” or start to use a baby voice, reverting to a younger age during homework time. Homework may be a challenge because it takes forever and does not feel fun. Reading takes a long time, and the pace is so slow that it is hard to remember the content. These children may really dislike reading. Children who struggle with sight word recall are not encoding and remembering what they see on the page. This challenge is indicative of a problem with sight word recall. Your child may still need to sound out ‘mother’ each time it appears in the text. Maybe you’ve seen the word ‘mother’ appear fifteen times in “Are you my mother?” Sometimes it is even repeated on the same page. The same simple book, read over and over, may take forever each time. If your child is really struggling with reading, he or she may be having difficulty with sight word recall.