7 Visual Abilities

1. 20/20 Eyesight

20/20 eyesight means you can see letters on a standard eye chart as clearly as someone with “normal” vision at 20 feet. However, this common metric—often tested at Marietta clinics like WellStar Kennestone Hospital—doesn’t guarantee functional vision for daily tasks.

What 20/20 Doesn’t Guarantee:

• Sustained Focus: Reading or screen work without eye strain (a frequent issue for Cobb County students).
• Depth Perception: Safe night driving on Atlanta highways like I-75.
• Comfort: Freedom from vision-related headaches, even with updated glasses.

Why Marietta Patients Need More:
At Cook Vision Therapy Center, serving Metro Atlanta for 40+ years, we assess 6 critical visual abilities beyond 20/20—skills ignored in routine exams. For example, a Marietta high schooler may ace an eye chart but struggle to track text due to poor convergence.

2. Eye-Muscle Coordination: Why Marietta Patients Struggle with Focus

Your eyes rely on 14 muscles working in sync, controlled by the brain, to maintain clear, comfortable vision. When coordination falters (common in Cobb County students and professionals), symptoms like double vision, eye strain, or drifting eyes (strabismus) emerge.

Local Impact of Poor Coordination:

• Reading & Learning: Marietta students may lose focus during homework due to muscle fatigue.
• Sports & Driving: Reduced 3D vision affects performance in East Cobb Little League or night driving on Atlanta’s I-75.
• Severe Cases: Untreated issues risk permanent amblyopia (“lazy eye”), requiring specialized therapy.

How Cook Vision Therapy Helps:
With 40+ years serving Metro Atlanta, our Marietta clinic uses personalized exercises to retrain muscle-brain communication. For example, a Smyrna office worker regained screen comfort after 8 weeks of therapy targeting convergence insufficiency.

3. Eye Control

Eye contact is used for “keeping our eyes on the ball” or maintaining eye contact during conversations. When Eye Control is inaccurate, seeing is inaccurate. Our Eye Control is a direct measure of how vision is affecting our attention.

4. Visual Tracking

We use the term Visual Tracking to include how quickly and accurately we move our eyes across a line of print. During reading, poor Visual Tracking causes loss of place, confusing one word with another, careless errors, and difficulty breaking words down into their parts.

5. Visual Perception: How Marietta Students & Artists Process the World Differently

Visual perception is the brain’s ability to interpret shapes, patterns, and relationships, like an artist capturing Marietta’s Kennesaw Mountain landscapes or a child confusing “b” and “d” in Cobb County classrooms. Weaknesses here impact learning, work, and daily tasks.

Local Challenges of Poor Visual Perception:

• Academic Struggles: Difficulty recognizing sight words (e.g., Atlanta’s “Read Right” literacy programs).
• Everyday Tasks: Adults misreading GPS directions on GA-400 or mismanaging spreadsheets.
• Creative Limits: Aspiring artists in Marietta’s Art Station classes may struggle with spatial relationships.

Cook Vision Therapy’s Solution:
For 40+ years, our Marietta clinic has addressed perception gaps with tailored exercises. For instance, a Smyrna third grader improved reading fluency by 70% after 12 weeks of symbol discrimination drills.

6. Eye-hand Coordination

We can divide our ability to get our eyes to guide our hands into “little” coordination and “big” coordination. We need “little” coordination to copy sentences and to keep words equally spaced and on the line. We need “big” coordination to throw or catch a ball or to guide a steering wheel. The “big” type of eye-hand coordination is also very much linked with balance, general coordination, and 3D Vision.

7. Visualization

Visualization is sometimes called “seeing with the mind’s eye.” If visualization is good, a child or adult can “see” words in the mind to spell them. They can “see” the story when they are reading. They can picture their goals in their minds. They can picture the consequences of their actions. Visualization allows us to learn from the past and plan for the future.