01/29/2022
For anyone interested in how Dawson sees. His vision isssues are obviously related to his traumatic brain injury and not his eyes. Classic symptoms related to his neurological visual impairment are visual latency, which means he needs sufficient wait times to localize and then fixate on an object, which is characterized by him looking at an object and then looking away to process it before he will look back to fixate in it, and difficulty with visual novelty. Which means he prefers objects he has viewed enough to recognize and doesn’t like objects that are new. Complex items are also hard to interpret. His progression through “learning to see” has changed drastically due to early intervention. It used to take him days of exposure to new items before he could truly process them. This birthday balloon has been hanging above his chair since his birthday. So for 6 days now and he has never noticed it because I never presented it to him. After presenting it to him multiple times and him processing it you can physically see how much easier it is for him to process and recognize an object and then become interested in it. He now knows that it is floating above him when he never did before.