Skip to content
Glossary

Visual-Motor Integration

The ability to use what your eyes see to guide what your hands do, the foundation of handwriting, catching, and cutting.

Visual-motor integration is the coordination of the visual system with motor output, the ability to look at a shape and then copy it accurately, to watch a ball and reach to catch it, to see a line on a page and write on it. Weak visual-motor integration often looks like "careless" work: letters and numbers reversed, columns of arithmetic that drift across the page, inability to copy from the whiteboard. Children with this difficulty are often highly intelligent but struggle to get their knowledge onto paper. Paediatric OTs screen for visual-motor integration using standardised tests (such as the Beery VMI) before planning handwriting interventions.