title: Braille in the Sighted: Teaching Tactile Reading to Sighted Adults.
abstract: Blind people are known to have superior perceptual abilities in their remaining senses. Several studies suggest that these enhancements are dependent on the specific experience of blind individuals, who use those remaining senses more than sighted subjects. In line with this view, sighted subjects, when trained, are able to significantly progress in relatively simple tactile tasks. However, the case of complex tactile tasks is less obvious, as some studies suggest that visual deprivation itself could confer large advantages in learning them. It remains unclear to what extent those complex skills, such as braille reading, can be learnt by sighted subjects. Here we enrolled twenty-nine sighted adults, mostly braille teachers and educators, in a 9-month braille reading course. At the beginning of the course, all subjects were naive in tactile braille reading. After the course, almost all were able to read whole braille words at a mean speed of 6 words-per-minute. Subjects with low tactile acuity did not differ significantly in braille reading speed from the rest of the group, indicating that low tactile acuity is not a limiting factor for learning braille, at least at this early stage of learning. Our study shows that most sighted adults can learn whole-word braille reading, given the right method and a considerable amount of motivation. The adult sensorimotor system can thus adapt, to some level, to very complex tactile tasks without visual deprivation. The pace of learning in our group was comparable to congenitally and early blind children learning braille in primary school, which suggests that the blind's mastery of complex tactile tasks can, to a large extent, be explained by experience-dependent mechanisms.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Jagiellonian University, Krakow, Poland.|Laboratory of Brain Imaging, Neurobiology Center, Nencki Institute of Experimental Biology, Warsaw, Poland.
authors.forename: Łukasz
authors.initials: Ł
authors.lastname: Bola
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Jagiellonian University, Krakow, Poland.|INSERM U 1127, CNRS UMR 7225, Sorbonne Universités, and Université Pierre et Marie Curie-Paris 6, UMR S 1127, Institut du Cerveau et de la Moelle épinière (ICM), Paris, France.
authors.forename: Katarzyna
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Siuda-Krzywicka
authors.affiliation: Academy of Special Education in Warsaw, Warsaw, Poland.
authors.forename: Małgorzata
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Paplińska
authors.affiliation: Institute for the Blind and Partially Sighted Children in Krakow, Krakow, Poland.
authors.forename: Ewa
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Sumera
authors.affiliation: Electrical Drive Division, Institute of Control and Industrial Electronics, Warsaw University of Technology, Warsaw, Poland.
authors.forename: Paweł
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Hańczur
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Jagiellonian University, Krakow, Poland.
authors.forename: Marcin
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Szwed
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001766:Blindness; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007858:Learning; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D010465:Perception; D011932:Reading; D012682:Sensory Aids; D014110:Touch; D055815:Young Adult