Getting in touch with pictures and words: educational strategies for the blind

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.