Visual-spatial development occupies multiple areas of the brain and intersects the pathways of all sensory and motor processing as well as emotional and cognitive functions. This conference will help you think more broadly about this important and often overlooked domain: what these challenges look like, how visual-spatial capacities develop, how they work in parallel with the functional emotional developmental capacities, and what their intersecting pathways are. We will examine the impact of visual-spatial experience and processing on all developmental areas, as DIR® therapists of different disciplines illustrate how emotions can be used to harness each child's capacities to think and resolve visual-spatial challenges. This conference will “open your eyes” to the mind’s inner world of visual-spatial knowledge with our renowned interdisciplinary experts, featuring Temple Grandin, illustrating how you too can add this dimension to your intervention goals. 

• Expand and deepen your practice to understand and address visual-spatial challenges in mental health, communication, movement and learning
• Differentiate sight and vision and discern the differences in assessment and treatment
• Describe the domino effect of intersecting pathways impacting autistic and other neurodiverse individuals
• Define the functions of being visually bound, visual anchors, and repetitive behaviors
• iIentify visual-spatial challenges in various domains of functioning such as emotional development and attachment, daily adaptation and executive function, language, and symbolic abstract thinking
• Recognize visual-spatial process’ impact on attention, anxiety, mood regulation, and sense of self and agency
• Understand how visual-spatial challenges impact learning and strategies to address these in the classroom
• Apply individually tailored treatment and parenting approaches