the vision of blind people

[frandroid]

"Separating the visual characteristics from the spatial characteristics of an image (or object or drawing) is quite difficult. But an ingenious series of studies by Nancy Kerr (1983) has apparently succeeded at this task. Hers was a map-scanning study, very similar to that of Kosslyn et al. (1978) described earlier. However, in this case some of the participants were congenitally blind and learned the "map" by feeling objects (each of which had a distinct shape) placed on a surface. Once participants had learned the locations, they heard the experimenter name a pair of objects and were asked to focus mentally on one and to imagine moving a raised dot from that object to the second.

Kerr found that the greater distance between objects, the longer it took both blind and sighted participants to scan. Results of this study echoed those of Kosslyn et all. (1978), suggesting that visual imagery has spatial properties. The spatial properties are similar to visual representations but need not be visual, because congenitally blind people--without vision--apparently atre able to make use of visual images."

Comments

[unkle-social.livejournal.com]

neat!