CVIT 3-6

Children’s Visual Impairment Test for 3-6 year olds

Project description

Cerebral visual impairment (CVI), or cortical visual impairment, is a neurological condition. Children with CVI have difficulties with seeing and interpreting the world around them. This is not because of an eye condition, but because their brain has been injured and is interpreting the information from the eyes differently than most of us do. Most children with CVI had a brain injury around birth. CVI is difficult to diagnose in young children because there are no visual perception tests that are suitable for children under the age of five. We developed a screening test for visual perception functions that are commonly impaired in children with CVI. Our test can help professionals to diagnose CVI early on so children can get the appropriate support as soon as possible.

Following development of the test, we have asked about 300 typically developing children to take the test. This taught us what the normal range of scores for CVIT 3-6 was for different ages (third image). We can now compare the score of a patient with the scores of typically developing children to see if it falls in the normal range. We also found that the scores on CVIT 3-6 were much lower for children with CVI (CVI in fourth image) compared to children with an intellectual impairment (II in fourth image), typically developing children (TD in fourth image), and children with simulated low visual acuity (VA in fourth image). This shows that our tests specifically measures visual perception and scores are not influenced by intelligence or visual acuity.

CVIT 3-6 is freely available here.

Funder

Flemish Government – Methusalem programme

Collaborators

Prof Johan Wagemans – University of Leuven

Prof Els Ortibus – University Hospitals Leuven

Run time

2013-2019

Associated publications

Vancleef, K., Janssens, E., Petré, Y., Wagemans, J., & Ortibus, E. (2020). Assessment tool for visual perception deficits in Cerebral Visual Impairment (CVIT 3-6): Development and normative data of typically-developing children. Developmental Medicine and Child Neurology. 62(1), 111-117. https://doi.org/10.1111/dmcn.14303

Vancleef, K., Janssens, E., Petré, Y., Wagemans, J., & Ortibus, E. (2020). Assessment tool for visual perception deficits in cerebral visual impairment: Reliability and validity. Developmental Medicine and Child Neurology, 62(1), 118-124. https://doi.org/10.1111/dmcn.14304

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