A preliminary study of the relation of visual attention to stimulus complexity and functional vision in individuals with cortical visual impairment: Implications for AAC.

Individuals with Cortical Visual Impairment (CVI) can have difficulties with visual processing due to physical damage or atypical structures of visual pathways or visual processing centers in the brain. CVI differs from ocular visual impairment, which is the consequence of conditions or disease in the eye or optic nerve. Many individuals with CVI have concomitant disabilities, including significant communication support needs; these individuals can benefit from augmentative and alternative communication (AAC). Because much AAC involves a visual channel, implementation of AAC must consider and respond to the unique visual processing skills and challenges in CVI. Yet little is known empirically about how to best design AAC for individuals with CVI. The current study examined processing of visual stimuli in four young adolescents with CVI. Due to COVID-19 restrictions, data were collected over Zoom and coded by hand by trained research assistants. The coding captured participants’ engagement with stimuli of various levels of complexity, and the influence of a social cue on this engagement. Participants engaged most with the simplest stimuli (relative to the size of those stimuli) and engaged more when a social cue was provided during the task. Level of engagement with more complex stimuli was related to participants’ score on the CVI Range, a clinical assessment tool that characterizes level of visual functioning. Implications for AAC include considerations for the internal complexity of AAC symbols as well as the complexity of the arrays created for individuals with CVI.