Haptic Learning of Spatial Concepts: Can Training in Raised-Line Drawings Improve Blind People's Spatial Capacity?

The purpose of this research was to evaluate the impact of instruction in raised-line drawings on the spatial imagery capacity of congenitally and late blind people. The participants first performed preliminary tasks in order to evaluate their individual level of experience in the recognition and production of raised-line drawings. Then, all the participants (experienced congenitally and late blind groups, non-experienced congenitally and late blind groups, and blindfolded sighted participants) were presented with a mental rotation task, a mental spatial displacement task, and a direction judgment task. After this pre-test, half of the non-experienced participants (congenitally and late blind) were trained for 6 months in the recognition and production of raised-line drawings. Then, all the groups were presented again with the 3 spatial tasks (post-test). Results showed that the experienced participants performed better than the non-experienced ones in all the spatial imagery tasks of the pre-test. Contrary to the non-trained participants, the trained participants improved their skills as revealed during the post-test, and they performed as well as the non-trained experienced blind groups on all the spatial tasks of the post-test. These data indicate that a short yet intensive training of the blind people had a significant effect and that the benefits generalize to other spatial tasks (i.e., mental rotation, mental spatial displacement, and direction judgment tasks). In addition to a better understanding of blind people's cognitive functioning, these results may have important implications regarding the value of line drawing training in the education of visually impaired people.