title: Abilities and strategies of blind and sighted subjects in visuo-spatial imagery.
abstract: An active visuo-spatial memory task was used in order to determine the characteristics of mental imagery in subjects with and without visual experience. Subjects were instructed to generate a mental representation of verbally presented 2D patterns that were placed in a grid and to indicate how many pattern elements were in corresponding positions in the two halves of the grid according to a specific grid axis (vertical or horizontal). Unexpectedly, results showed a similar performance in early blind, late blind and sighted subjects. However, subjects' debriefing showed that the three groups used different strategies. The sighted and the late blind subjects took advantage of a visuo-spatial strategy. They generated a mental image of the matrix and they simplified this image to maintain only the relevant information in memory. In contrast, the early blind subjects encoded each pattern element by its location in a (X,Y) coordinate system without visual representation. This indicates that both early and late blind subjects are able to perform an active visuo-spatial imagery task as well as sighted subjects although they use different strategies.
authors.affiliation: Neural Rehabilitation Engineering Laboratory, Université Catholique de Louvain, Av. Hippocrate 54, UCL 54-46, Brussels B-1200, Belgium. vanlierde@gren.ucl.ac.be
authors.forename: Annick
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Vanlierde
authors.forename: Marie-Chantal
authors.initials: MC
authors.lastname: Wanet-Defalque
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001076:Aptitude; D001766:Blindness; D003071:Cognition; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007092:Imagination; D008297:Male; D016555:Matched-Pair Analysis; D008875:Middle Aged; D013028:Space Perception; D014796:Visual Perception