ABSTRACT
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Tactual processing of information is of much more significance for blind than sighted persons, for whom it is a less dominant channel of communication. However, it has received much less attention than verbal or visual processing of... more
Tactual processing of information is of much more significance for blind than sighted persons, for whom it is a less dominant channel of communication. However, it has received much less attention than verbal or visual processing of information. In this article, the main outcomes of a series of experiments with congenitally blind children are described, with their performance on a series of spatial reasoning and shape recognition tasks compared to that of blindfolded, partially sighted controls. Results suggest that congenitally blind subjects perform as well as, if not better than, blindfolded subjects on simple 2-dimensional tactual processing tasks, but less well on more complex tasks requiring them to store, compare and label objects. This is thought to reflect their poorer sensory coding abilities and their more limited experience of pictures and representations of objects. While other work suggests that blind children can be trained to enhance these skills, the fact that they appear to utilise different learning strategies should be taken into consideration in educational practice and explored further in future research.
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Two studies are reported in which comprehension and interpretation of raised-line images and graphs by touch were investigated. Experiment 1 required blind-folded sighted subjects and blind subjects to rate the veracity of raised-line... more
Two studies are reported in which comprehension and interpretation of raised-line images and graphs by touch were investigated. Experiment 1 required blind-folded sighted subjects and blind subjects to rate the veracity of raised-line drawings in conveying the nature of an image when the complexity of the depicted object was manipulated (from simple outlines to more complex exaggeration of salient features). Results showed no effect of complexity on veracity ratings. Experiment 2 involved the assessment of blind and visually impaired subjects of line-graphs, histograms and pie charts which varied in information content and perceptible detail (textured and untextured). Histograms were easier to interpret than line-graphs, but there were no differences between histograms and pie charts. An increase in information content had little effect on comprehension.
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Blind and sighted children’s memory for words and raised shape pictures was tested. The investigation compared performance with items when they were studied under neutral conditions (naming words and pictures) and when they were... more
Blind and sighted children’s memory for words and raised shape pictures was tested. The investigation compared performance with items when they were studied under neutral conditions (naming words and pictures) and when they were self-generated in response to cues (cue: hot ?: response: cold). The blind children could identify and name the raised shape pictures with the same apparent ease as blind-folded sighted children (as long as a cue was provided). The sighted children showed the generation effect (Slamecka and Graf, 1978) for both words and pictures, namely that self-generated items were far better recalled than neutral ones. The pattern of results for the blind children was markedly different. Although the level of memory performance overall was the same as that of the sighted controls, the congenitally blind children showed areverse generation effect. A stem completion study indicated that these results couldnot be accounted for by a relatively greater reliance on data-driven processing by the blind.
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2 word/nonword decision experiments were carried out to investigate differences in reading that might exist between congenitally blind children reading Braille and sighted children dealing with print. 3 aspects of single-word recognition... more
2 word/nonword decision experiments were carried out to investigate differences in reading that might exist between congenitally blind children reading Braille and sighted children dealing with print. 3 aspects of single-word recognition were studied: semantic processing, word-frequency effects, and phonological recoding. In addition, a comparison of word recognition performance was made under normal conditions and under conditions of reduced legibility. The sighted children showed an increased semantic facilitation effect with degraded when compared with undegraded print conditions. In contrast, for the blind children this trend was reversed. The magnitude of the word-frequency effect was unaffected by script legibility in either group. In addition, an increased difficulty of rejecting pseudohomophones (e.g., bloo) relative to legal nonwords (e.g., ploo) was found for the blind in the degraded condition and for the sighted with degraded and undegraded print. These results are discussed in terms of the relative influence of perceptual feature-analysis processes and attentional semantic processing.
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ABSTRACT For wayfinding at museums, galleries, and heritage sites, the majority of people who are blind or partially sighted favour verbal directions over tactile maps. Those who provide such directions are usually fully sighted. Can we... more
ABSTRACT For wayfinding at museums, galleries, and heritage sites, the majority of people who are blind or partially sighted favour verbal directions over tactile maps. Those who provide such directions are usually fully sighted. Can we assume that details considered important by those with vision are equally helpful to those without? This article presents a study comparing descriptions of familiar routes recalled by fully sighted, partially sighted, and blind participants, highlighting the differences in navigation strategies. All participants cited landmarks, but those with impaired vision also detailed significantly more objects, or ‘milestones’, en route. In the absence of such milestones, they relied on metrics that were often environmental or body-based. Distances were precisely specified, rather than ‘vague’. Landmarks and milestones were accessed multimodally by blind and partially sighted participants, or a combination of landmarks and milestones were sought for corroboration. In contrast, fully sighted participants reported predominantly unimodal information, that is, visual. The findings may have practical implications for improving the type of verbal orientation information provided to assist blind or partially sighted people.
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Two experiments were carried out to investigate phonological and tactual coding in Braille reading by blind children. In the first, the children read aloud two lists of word pairs, one item at a time. The second or... more
Two experiments were carried out to investigate phonological and tactual coding in Braille reading by blind children. In the first, the children read aloud two lists of word pairs, one item at a time. The second or 'target' word of each pair (e.g. on) was the same in both lists. In one list, the congruent list, the phonology and orthography of the first word of the pair (sun) provided no inconsistency with respect to the target word (sun-on). In the other incongruent list, the preceding word was similar in orthography but inconsistent in phonology with respect to the target word (son-on). The children named the target words (i.e. on) significantly faster in the context of the congruous list than in the context of the incongruous list, thus revealing a phonological effect in the blind children's reading of single words. In addition, direct lexical access, from tactual input, seems to proceed with the same facility for the blind as does visual input for the sighted. In the second study the children read aloud words which were either orthographically regular or irregular. The results indicated that the irregular words took longer to name than the regular words. It was suggested that blind children, like sighted children, show phonological interference effects in word naming. The results are discussed in relation to recent models of the processes involved in word naming.
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Three studies are reported which investigate word priming and memory in congenitally blind and sighted children. Two conditions were of particular interest, a neutral condition, where children read aloud or repeated a word, and a generate... more
Three studies are reported which investigate word priming and memory in congenitally blind and sighted children. Two conditions were of particular interest, a neutral condition, where children read aloud or repeated a word, and a generate condition, where children supplied a target word to a close semantic associate given as a cue. Later, memory for those items was tested and although the two groups did not differ in overall performance a marked interaction across group and condition was noted. The sighted children showed a significant 'generation' effect (Slamecka & Graf, 1978), where active involvement in a word task led to increased memory. In contrast, the congenitally blind remembered relatively less material when active participation was required, showing a 'reverse-generation' effect. The results are discussed with reference to the effect on memory of data and conceptually driven processing in the study phase. It is tentatively suggested that the congenitally blind may show different learning strategies from the sighted as a result of allocating more attention to sensory information processing.
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Research Interests: Psychology, Blindness, Reading, Adolescent, Humans, and 3 moreChild, Discrimination Learning, and Stereognosis
ABSTRACT The study investigated the extent to which two groups of blind children were able to use tactual picture information to improve memory performance for auditorily presented texts. Adventitiously blind children demonstrated... more
ABSTRACT The study investigated the extent to which two groups of blind children were able to use tactual picture information to improve memory performance for auditorily presented texts. Adventitiously blind children demonstrated significant increases in amount recalled with illustrated presentation, showing improved recall of information represented in both the text and the picture. For congenitally blind children, the pictures also produced increased recall of pictorial information, but this was at the expense of recall of non-pictorial information represented in the text only.
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Background The study grew out of a music workshop held during the FOCUS Families UK Conference (2003). A number of parents reported that their children had what seemed to be unusually high levels of musical interest or ability, and they... more
Background The study grew out of a music workshop held during the FOCUS Families UK Conference (2003). A number of parents reported that their children had what seemed to be unusually high levels of musical interest or ability, and they asked whether these characteristics may be ...
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Recent anecdotal evidence and appearances in the US media have indicated that children with septo-optic dysplasia (sod) may have a tendency to precocious musical development, in some cases leading to 'savant syndrome'. Here,... more
Recent anecdotal evidence and appearances in the US media have indicated that children with septo-optic dysplasia (sod) may have a tendency to precocious musical development, in some cases leading to 'savant syndrome'. Here, initial evidence based on a questionnaire ...
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This article reports the results of an exploratory survey of 32 families of children with septo-optic dysplasia and 32 families of children without visual impairment or any specific health problems (who served as a comparison group). The... more
This article reports the results of an exploratory survey of 32 families of children with septo-optic dysplasia and 32 families of children without visual impairment or any specific health problems (who served as a comparison group). The focus of the research was to explore the ...
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Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) often display impairments in creativity, yet savant artists with ASD are reported to produce highly novel and original artistic outputs. To explore this paradox, we assessed nine savant... more
Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) often display impairments in creativity, yet savant artists with ASD are reported to produce highly novel and original artistic outputs. To explore this paradox, we assessed nine savant artists with ASD, nine talented ...
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Research Interests: Psychology, Creativity, Poetry, Content Analysis, Language, and 15 moreMedicine, Psychological Medicine, Humans, Female, Aptitude, Middle Aged, Self Assessment, Public health systems and services research, Communication barriers, Social Behavior Disorders, Syndrome, Neurosciences, Case Control Studies, Autistic disorder, and Language tests
In this single case study, paintings by a visually impaired and cognitively handicapped savant artist are evaluated. He paints his pictures exclusively from memory, either after having looked at a natural scene through binoculars, or... more
In this single case study, paintings by a visually impaired and cognitively handicapped savant artist are evaluated. He paints his pictures exclusively from memory, either after having looked at a natural scene through binoculars, or after studying landscape photographs in brochures, catalogues, and books. The paintings are compared with the models from which they were derived, and the resulting generative changes are accounted for by an interaction between impaired visual input and memory transformations.
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Autobiographical knowledge is stored hierarchically, at both specific and general levels of representation. It has also been proposed that the self is the structure around which autobiographical memories are organised. The current series... more
Autobiographical knowledge is stored hierarchically, at both specific and general levels of representation. It has also been proposed that the self is the structure around which autobiographical memories are organised. The current series of studies assessed whether the ...
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Although executive functions have been widely studied in individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD), there have been no direct empirical studies of executive abilities in savants with ASD. This study assessed three facets of... more
Although executive functions have been widely studied in individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD), there have been no direct empirical studies of executive abilities in savants with ASD. This study assessed three facets of executive ability (fluency, perseveration and monitoring) in savant artists with ASD, compared to non-talented adults with ASD or mild/moderate learning difficulties (MLD). Executive functions were assessed
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We explored the hypothesis that an enhanced local processing style is characteristic of both art and autism spectrum disorder (ASD) by examining local and global processing in savant artists with ASD. Specifically, savant artists were... more
We explored the hypothesis that an enhanced local processing style is characteristic of both art and autism spectrum disorder (ASD) by examining local and global processing in savant artists with ASD. Specifically, savant artists were compared against non-talented individuals with ASD or mild/moderate learning difficulties (MLD), as well as talented or non-talented students, on the block design task and meaningful and abstract versions of the Embedded Figures Test (EFT). Results demonstrated that there were no significant differences between the meaningful and abstract versions of the EFT, in any of the groups. This suggests that the primary process governing performance on this task was perceptual (local), rather than conceptual (global). More interestingly, the savant artists performed above the level of the ASD and MLD groups on the block design test, but not the EFT. Despite both the block design task and the EFT measuring local processing abilities, we suggest that this is due ...
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The weak central coherence (WCC) theory of autism1 proposes that autism is characterized by a cognitive style that biases processing towards local features at the expense of global, context-dependent meaning or gestalt. However, some... more
The weak central coherence (WCC) theory of autism1 proposes that autism is characterized by a cognitive style that biases processing towards local features at the expense of global, context-dependent meaning or gestalt. However, some autistic individuals, known as savants, show exceptional abilities within specific domains, one of which is music. Musical savants all have absolute pitch ability and in addition demonstrate detailed knowledge about key relationships in their improvisations and memory reproductions. They do not appear to demonstrate deficits in global processing, at least within their talent domain. In order to explore the link between autistic cognition and savant musical ability, a series of experiments with musically naive autistic children and intelligence- and age-matched normal controls were carried out.