Developmental visual–spatial disorder
Frequency estimated to be around 3%.
Nonverbal learning disorder a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by core deficits in non-verbal skills, especially visual-spatial processing.
People with this condition have normal or advanced verbal intelligence and significantly lower nonverbal intelligence.
Diagnostic criteria are inconsistent.
Proposed additional diagnostic criteria include intact verbal intelligence, and deficits in the following: visuoconstruction abilities, speech prosody, fine motor coordination, mathematical reasoning, visuospatial memory and social skills.
NVLD is not recognised by the DSM-5 and is not clinically distinct from learning disorders.
NVLD symptoms can overlap with symptoms of autism, bipolar disorder, and ADHD.
Using an analog clock to tell time is difficult for people with symptoms of NVLD.
Considered to be neurologically based, nonverbal learning disorder is characterized by:
impairments in visuospatial processing discrepancy between average to superior verbal abilities and impaired nonverbal abilities, such as: visuoconstruction fine motor coordination mathematical reasoning visuospatial memory socioemotional skills
People with NVLD may have trouble understanding charts, reading maps, assembling jigsaw puzzles, and using an analog clock to tell time.
Clumsiness. is common in people with NVLD, especially children, and it may take a child with NVLD longer than usual to learn how to tie shoelaces or to ride a bicycle.
Children with symptoms of NVLD struggle with tasks that require eye–hand coordination, such as coloring and using scissors, but often excel at memorizing verbal content, spelling, and reading once the shapes of the letters are learned.
A child with NVLD’s verbal skills can be misattributed to attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, defiant behavior, inattention, or lack of effort.
Children appear as having a deficiency in social perception, meaning that there is inability which precludes acquiring the significance of basic nonverbal aspects of daily living, though verbal level of intelligence falls within or above the average.
In the adolescent years schoolwork becomes more abstract and the executive demands for time management, organization, and social interactions increase, individuals with NVLD begin to struggle.
These individuals focus on details and struggle to summarize information or to integrate ideas, and to apply knowledge to other situations, to infer implicit information, to predict, or organize information logically.
Tasks such as driving a car, navigating in an unfamiliar location may be difficult.
Patients with NVLD have difficulty with keeping track of their responsibilities or managing social interactions.
People with NVLD may have dyscalculia, dysgraphia, or dyspraxia.
NVLD is associated with an imbalance of neural activity in the right hemisphere of the brain connected to the white matter.
Diagnosis: characterized by deficits in visualspatial processing and social impairment.
Additional proposed diagnostic criteria include average to superior verbal intelligence and deficits in visuoconstruction abilities, fine motor coordination, mathematical reasoning, visuospatial memory and social skills.
The form of autism previously called Asperger syndrome can overlap.
The major clinical difference is that NVLD criteria do not mention the presence or absence of either repetitive behaviors or narrow subject-matter interests, which is part of the diagnostic criteria for autism.
Overlapping conditions include:
attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) autism spectrum, especially high-functioning autism bipolar disorder developmental coordination disorder (dyspraxia) dyscalculia social communication disorder right hemisphere brain damage and developmental right hemisphere syndrome social-emotional processing disorder Gerstmann syndrome