Blindness and Sensory Compensation
Blindness and Sensory Compensation
This chapter studies how other senses compensate for the lack of visual sense in visually impaired people. It presents several studies, stating that basic perceptual skills are responsible for blind people’s enhanced auditory capacity related to pitch stimuli. Another study is presented that relates to higher auditory temporal resolution capacity with early blindness. The chapter also presents a controversial study on blind individuals’ enhanced spatial localization capacity, as well as a study showing the perceptual difference between a sighted and a blind person relating to the auditory space. It presents several studies which support as well as contradict the belief that blind people have enhanced tactile spatial acuity, and others which suggest that multi-sensory interactions are affected by blindness.
Keywords: blindness, visually impaired people, auditory capacity, perceptual skills, spatial localization, tactile spatial acuity, multi-sensory interactions
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