The influence of visual experience on the ability to form spatial mental models based on route and survey descriptions (original) (raw)
Related papers
Spatial representations in blind people: The role of strategies and mobility skills
The role of vision in the construction of spatial representations has been the object of numerous studies and heated debate. The core question of whether visual experience is necessary to form spatial representations has found different, often contradictory answers. The present paper examines mental images generated from verbal descriptions of spatial environments. Previous evidence had shown that blind individuals have difficulty remembering information about spatial environments. By testing a group of congenitally blind people, we replicated this result and found that it is also present when the overall mental model of the environment is assessed. This was not always the case, however, but appeared to correlate with some blind participants’ lower use of a mental imagery strategy and preference for a verbal rehearsal strategy, which was adopted particularly by blind people with more limited mobility skills. The more independent blind people who used a mental imagery strategy performed as well as sighted participants, suggesting that the difficulty blind people may have in processing spatial descriptions is not due to the absence of vision per se, but could be the consequence of both, their using less efficient verbal strategies and having poor mobility skills.
Autonomous Physical Exploration Influences Spatial Representation: Evidence From Blind and Sighted
Evidences demonstrated that verbal information allows to construct a mental representation of space, even for persons who have no previous experience of sight. However, the construction of a mental model from verbal description is not presentation-free, as the verbal description anchors participants to a single perspective. The aim of our study is to test the perspective of spatial representation after the physical exploration of space, in order to avoid the influence of format presentation. We asked visual impaired and sighted participants to explore autonomously a room and then to perform a Sentence Verification Task, with sentences presented in an egocentric and in an allocentric version. We measured both response time and accuracy. Data demonstrated a better performance with allocentric perspective, even if the response time suggests that participants are more confident with the egocentric perspective. In conclusion, we suggest that the physical exploration of space leads to the development of an allocentric representation.
Imagination, Cognition and Personality, 2003
In this study, we investigated the metric properties of spatial representations built from the verbal description of a spatial layout in early blind, late blind, and transiently visually deprived sighted participants. We adapted the verbal descriptions designed by Denis and Zimmer . Participants had to mentally compare distances separating pairs of landmarks. The analysis of the frequency of correct responses suggests that visual experience does not play a crucial role in the preservation of the topology of a memorized spatial configuration. However, response times differed significantly among groups, with participants who experienced transient visual deprivation being overall faster than those suffering permanent loss of vision. Lastly, for all groups, the smaller the difference between two pairs of distances, the longer the response time, which attests to the presence of a symbolic distance effect. To conclude, if mental representations can be considered as reflecting described spatial layouts analogically, our data do not provide any strong evidence in favor of the visual character of these analog representations.
Allocentric and contra-aligned spatial representations of a town environment in blind people
Acta Psychologica, 2017
Evidence concerning the representation of space by blind individuals is still unclear, as sometimes blind people behave like sighted people do, while other times they present difficulties. A better understanding of blind people's difficulties, especially with reference to the strategies used to form the representation of the environment, may help to enhance knowledge of the consequences of the absence of vision. The present study examined the representation of the locations of landmarks of a real town by using pointing tasks that entailed either allocentric points of reference with mental rotations of different degrees, or contra-aligned representations. Results showed that, in general, people met difficulties when they had to point from a different perspective to aligned landmarks or from the original perspective to contra-aligned landmarks, but this difficulty was particularly evident for the blind. The examination of the strategies adopted to perform the tasks showed that only a small group of blind participants used a survey strategy and that this group had a better performance with respect to people who adopted route or verbal strategies. Implications for the comprehension of the consequences on spatial cognition of the absence of visual experience are discussed, focusing in particular on conceivable interventions. Highlights: • Blind and blindfolded sighted participants explored a tridimensional city map • They performed pointing tasks entailing allocentric and contra-aligned representations • Performance decreased with increasing mental rotations and contra-aligned representations • Differences between blind and sighted people were observed • Participants who used a survey strategy performed better
The Extemalization of Spatial Representation by Blind Persons
Journal of Visual Impairment & Blindness, 1992
This article compares two procedures for the externalization of spatial representation. Blind children and adolescents had to learn two unknown environments and to externalize the spatial representation by building a model and estimating distances. High correlations were found between the two externalization methods and between those methods and two systems of measuring mobility.
STRATEGIES FOR CONSTRUCTING SPATIAL REPRESENTATIONS USED BY BLIND AND SIGHTED SUBJECTS
The study was designed to investigate imagery strategies used by blind and sighted individuals and their ability to operate spatial representations. Performance accuracy in the imagery tasks was confirmed to be similar in the blind individuals with no visual memories and in the sighted subjects. On the other hand, the findings showed differences in preferred imagery strategies. The sighted, more often than the blind subjects, used the strategy of visualizing spatial matrices. The blind subjects applied a tapping strategy more often than the sighted ones. Additional analysis focused on the function of working memory systems in processing spatial stimuli by the blind and sighted subjects.
The aim of this research is to assess whether the crucial factor in determining the characteristics of blind people’s spatial mental images is concerned with the visual impairment per se or the processing style that the dominant perceptual modalities used to acquire spatial information impose, i.e. simultaneous (vision) vs sequential (kinaesthesis). Participants were asked to learn six positions in a large parking area via movement alone (congenitally blind, adventitiously blind, blindfolded sighted) or with vision plus movement (simultaneous sighted, sequential sighted), and then to mentally scan between positions in the path. The crucial manipulation concerned the sequential sighted group. Their visual exploration was made sequential by putting visual obstacles within the pathway in such a way that they could not see simultaneously the positions along the pathway. The results revealed a significant time\distance linear relation in all tested groups. However, the linear component was lower in sequential sighted and blind participants, especially congenital. Sequential sighted and congenitally blind participants showed an almost overlapping performance. Differences between groups became evident when mentally scanning farther distances (more than 5 m). This threshold effect could be revealing of processing limitations due to the need of integrating and updating spatial information. Overall, the results suggest that the characteristics of the processing style rather than the visual impairment per se affect blind people’s spatial mental images.
Spatial Cognition & Computation, 2005
Successful wayfinding requires accurate encoding of two types of information: landmarks and the spatial relations between them (e.g. landmark X is left/north of Y). Although both types of information are crucial to wayfinding, behavioral and neurological evidence suggest that they have different substrates. In this paper, we consider the nature of the difference by examining comprehension times of spatial information (i.e. route and survey descriptions) and landmark descriptions. In two studies, participants learned simple environments by reading descriptions from route or survey perspectives, half with a single perspective switch. On half of the switch trials, a landmark description was introduced just prior to the perspective switch. In the first study, landmarks were embellished with descriptions of visual details, while in the second study, landmarks were embellished with descriptions of historic or other factual information. The presence of landmark descriptions did not increase the comprehension time of either route or survey descriptions, suggesting that landmark descriptions are perspective-neutral. Furthermore, visual landmark descriptions speeded comprehension time when the perspective was switched, whereas factual landmark descriptions had no effect on perspective switching costs. Taken together, the findings support separate processes for landmark and spatial information in construction of spatial mental models, and point to the importance of visual details of landmarks in facilitating mental model construction.
THE ROLE OF VISUAL EXPERIENCE IN KNOWLEDGE OF SPATIAL LAYOUT
1980
Adventitiously blinded. congenitally blind, and sighted adults made relative distance judgments in a familiar environment under three sets of instructions-neutral with respect to the metric of comparison, euclidean (straight-line distance between landmarks), and functional (walking distance between landmarks). Analysis of error scores and multidimensional scaling procedures indicated that, although there were no significant differences among groups under functional instructions, all three groups differed from one another under euclidean instructions. Specifically, the sighted group performed best and the congenitally blind group worst, with the adventitiously blind group in between. The results are discussed in the context of the role of visual experience in spatial representation and the application of these methods for evaluating orientation and mobility training for the blind.
Visual experience is not necessary for efficient survey spatial cognition: Evidence from blindness
2006
This study investigated whether the lack of visual experience affects the ability to create spatial inferential representations of the survey type. We compared the performance of persons with congenital blindness and that of blindfolded sighted persons on four survey representation-based tasks (Experiment 1). Results showed that persons with blindness performed better than blindfolded sighted controls. We repeated the same tests introducing a third group of persons with late blindness (Experiment 2). This last group performed better than blindfolded sighted participants, whereas differences between participants with late and congenital blindness were nonsignificant. The present findings are compatible with results of other studies, which found that when visual perception is lacking, skill in gathering environmental spatial information provided by nonvisual modalities may contribute to a proper spatial encoding. It is concluded that, although it cannot be asserted that total lack of visual experience incurs no cost, our findings are further evidence that visual experience is not a necessary condition for the development of spatial inferential complex representations.