*Visual Scan is a vital skill for sight-readers. While reading music, our eyes scan the score searching for targets. In order for you to understand visual Scan better, I will post a few definitions before describing the exercise.
Ocular Motility: the system that controls eye movement. It brings the fovea into alignment. It is very important for fast search (eye saccadic movement) while reading. Saccadic movement is the fastest movement our body performs. It happens between fixations.
Ocular Motility/Visual Tracking: it occurs when our eyes move without blurring or loosing the image. Very important for reading.
Directionality: it is the way our eyes follow text and music: top/bottom, left/right and return sweep (changing lines).
Temporal Visual Processing: see post January 11, 2010.
Exercise III
Visual Scan according to the PTS II manual, is a "perceptual cognitive practice that requires temporal visual processing, directionality, ocular motility, figure ground recognition, perceptual speed and planning".
The exercise requires you to spot targets among random characters. According to your level, these characters can be scarce or abundant.
The reader has to perform a very complex task. Besides identifying the targets, the main problem for me is the directionality. When the characters are scarce, spotting the target is easier. However, changing lines is harder because often there are no characters at the beginning of them. It is also hard to keep a strait eye movement when there are so many gaps between characters and target.
As the levels advance, directionality is easier and finding targets is harder since the screen is crowded and the targets are more disguised.
The goals in order to advance levels are: < 4.0 average errors per trial,
there is a time limit to finish the task according to the size of the target.
Variables are: size of the target,
number of random characters,
number of targets,
targets can be numbers, upper or lower letters and symbols (*,#.?,{,],etc).
At the beginning, I really struggled with this exercise. I am improving thanks to lots of practice. It looks like my visual scan needs work.
* Double click on the image to see my results.
I am almost done with this Exercise III and there are 80 runs to go. That means I will finish it way before the 150 trials. It sounds like I am not that bad at it as I thought.
ReplyDeleteThe print now is "book" size. I have been scanning two lines at a time (as I would with a piano score). I hardly make mistakes and I am a lot faster.
I am done with this exercise! I feel very good about it. Double click on the image to see the results. I improved a lot.
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