• Question: Oh I have so many questions! I work as an occupational therapist in elementary school mostly with special needs or struggling students. My role in the school is a little different than teachers since I have an opportunity to work with students more one and one and have a focus on the mind/ body connection. The thing that I noticed throughout the years is that struggling students tend to still have their primitive postural responses (ATNR, STNR, TLR) and have poor oculomotor control. Do you think that directly addressing these physical delays can have an impact on higher order learning skills? Any ideas why this is happening to students? Thank you in advance for help and I just wanted to say that this is such a wonderful idea and I hope it continues. Staying evidenced based in practice is a daunting task with so much research to sift through!

    Asked by loretod101 on 2 May 2015.
    • Photo: Joseph Devlin

      Joseph Devlin answered on 2 May 2015:

      I was hoping someone else who knew more about this would reply but since no one else has, I’ll give it a shot…

      Occulomotor difficulties certainly could affect things like learning to read. There is a strand of the dyslexia literature focused on low level visual deficits that have knock-on effects on higher order skills such as reading.

      I’m not familiar with the term “primitive postural responses” or the abbreviations you used: ATNR, STNR, TLR and google didn’t help me much. Can you provide a bit more information about what you mean? Many thanks.

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