Study learners

Question 1

“Blind participants have been shown to be able to memorise and subsequently navigate a complex route within a large-scale building “

Answer 1

Passini and Proulx, 1988

Question 2

Passini and Proulx, 1988 (positive finding)

Answer 2

Blind participants have been shown to be able to memorise and subsequently navigate a complex route within a large-scale building

Blind individuals required more planning details and decisions to wayfind, suggestive of greater cognitive effort.

Question 3

Blind participants have been shown to be able to perform judgements of distance between pairs of familiar places as accurately as sighted individuals

Answer 3

Bryne and Salter, 1983

Question 4

Bryne and Salter, 1983

Answer 4

Blind participants have been shown to be able to perform judgements of distance between pairs of familiar places as accurately as sighted individuals

Blind people performed worse than sighted people when describing the direction of familiar places from home and poorer again, when describing the direction from an imaginary location

Question 5

Blind participants were able to recall and replace objects in their locations of a round table/board

Answer 5

Hollins and Kelly, 1988

Question 6

Hollins and Kelly, 1988

Answer 6

Blind participants were able to recall and replace objects in their locations of a round table/board

Question 7

each of these studies also found limitations: Blind individuals required more planning details and decisions to wayfind, suggestive of greater cognitive effort.

Answer 7

Passini and Proulx, 1988

Question 8

Blind people performed worse than sighted people when describing the direction of familiar places from home and poorer again, when describing the direction from an imaginary location

Answer 8

Bryne and Salt, 1983

Question 9

(two references) Blind people experienced difficulty updating their cognitive map of the layout of objects when their own relative position/perspective had changed

Answer 9

(Hollins and Kelley, 1988; Riesar, Guth, and Hill, 1986).

Question 10

Network map is?

Answer 10

In a network maps routes are encoded as strings of nodes (a location), each node may have an embedded instruction to be acted upon when that node is reached (e.g., turn left); this allows estimations of distance but those of direction are difficult due to the reliance of relative bearings (e.g., left, right).

Question 11

Vector map is?

Answer 11

a vector-map that contains information about both locations and their location in space, and uses allocentric bearing (North, south, east, west), is required to estimate direction from an out of sight or imaginary location.

Question 12

Visually impaired are able to spatially-update when allowed to physically replace objects in a location that they have felt (REFERENCE 1), but not when they have only locomoted to an object(REFERENCE 2)

Answer 12

R1: Hollins and Kelley, 1988

R2: Riesar, Guth and Hill, 1986

Question 13

early- Blind participants found it no easier to spatial-update when locomoting to a new perspective point than when they imagined it (late blind and sighted people found locomoting helpful.)

Answer 13

Riesar, Guth and Hill, 1986

Question 14

However, these do not necessarily reflect deficiency as much as functional difference and unfavourable environments that have a relative abundance of visual prompts over haptic or auditory aids.

For example, congenitally and early blind children had innate difficulty using a tactile map to infer distance between objects – but with training in ratio-scaling were able to perform as well as their sighted peers.

Answer 14

Unger, Blades and Spencer, 1997

Question 15

Individuals with visual impairments may also have a preference for egocentric reference systems for both direction (e.g., left, right over north, west) and distance (e.g., number of steps over meters) because this reflective of the close-space nature of haptic experience.

Answer 15

Kalia et al. 2010

Question 16

Kalia et al. 2010

Answer 16

Individuals with visual impairments may also have a preference for egocentric reference systems for both direction (e.g., left, right over north, west) and distance (e.g., number of steps over meters) because this reflective of the close-space nature of haptic experience.

Question 17

Assessment of indoor route-finding technology for people with visual impairment

Answer 17

Kalia et al. 2010

Question 18

Teaching children to use a tactile map

Answer 18

Unger, Blades and Spencer, 1997

Question 19

Wayfinding in a large-scale building

Answer 19

Passini and Proulx, 1988

Question 20

Memorising the location of objects on a table

Answer 20

Hollins and Kelly, 1988

Question 21

Distance and direction of familiar place pairs

Answer 21

Bryne and Salt, 1983

Question 22

Spatially updating and locomoting/imagining perspective changes in a room with objects

Answer 22

Riesar, Guth and Hill, 1986

Question 23

Overview paper

Performance of blind individuals in many behaviours and tasks requiring imagery can be inferior to that of sighted subjects suggestive of a deficiency theory– the notion that the congenitally blind simply lack certain spatial skills, because they lack the visual experience necessary to develop them. However, surprisingly, despite limited or no visual experience blind individuals do appear to have the capacity for mental imagery. For example, blind individuals (as in sighted individuals) have a stronger memory for concrete, imaginable (i.e., possible to picture), words over abstract (non-imaginable words). Similarly, the laws of perspective appear to be present in the mental imagery of blind individuals. This is further reflected in the successful performance of spatial tasks, such as way-finding and memory for spatial layouts. Since blind individuals lack visual perception, their ability to perform well in tasks requiring the mental representation of space suggests that different cognitive mechanisms and compensatory mechanisms may help overcome visual impairment – as suggested by the qualitative difference theory.
The case for qualitative difference theory first requires dismissing the notion that mental imagery is a mere copy of visual input, as although there is cortical overlap between visual perception and imagery, they are not one and the same. Visual imagery requires a network of spatial subsystems and is likely the end product of a series of constructive processes that utilise different sources of information. In fact, visual cortical areas can be activated by objects presented in non-visual sensory modalities (e.g., touch). In the case of severe visual deprivation profound reorganisation phenomena occurs, such that areas originally devoted to process visual information are largely recruited by other sensory modalities (e.g., haptic, auditory). This suggests that visual perception may not, in fact, be required to develop mental representation of space.

Answer 23

Cattaneo et. al., 2008