The Assessment and Rehabilitation of Vision in Infants

Visual impairment is a large and growing socioeconomic problem. Although visual impairment and blindness among children is much less common than among adults, the potential lifespan of a child means that the lifelong impact of such impairment is very large (1). Observational and behavioral research has shown that early development of a child is constrained by impaired vision in a complex way (2-5). Examples include the integration and interpretation of input from the other senses, development of emotional bonding, personality and selfconcept, social interactive skills, sound and tactile localization skills, fine motor and locomotor competence, object permanence, and the formation of language and other cognitive concepts (3, 6-10). This makes vision therapy, in order to encourage visual functioning, a crucial therapy in early life of a child with lowvision.