The Effects of Distance and Intervening Obstacles on Visual Inference in Blind and Sighted Children

Abstract

Totally blind, visually impaired, and normally sighted children participated in a longitudinal study in which they were asked if an observer could see the toy they were holding from varying distances in three different tasks: (1) in front of the child with no intervening obstacles between the observer and the toy; (2) behind the child with the child's body as an intervening obstacle; (3) in front of the child with walls or furniture as intervening obstacles. Visually impaired and normally sighted children were given the tasks in both blindfold and nonblindfold conditions. The totally blind children mastered the tasks later than the other groups of children. The totally blind and visually impaired children in the blindfold condition made more mistakes in Tasks 1 and 2 when the observer was over 1 metre from them than when she was less than 1 metre from them. The totally blind children had more difficulty on Task 3 than the other children, and were the only children to make mistakes when walls were the intervening obstacles between the observer and the toy. The results suggest that blind children have difficulty understanding the effects of distance and intervening obstacles on vision and that their mistaken ideas may be based on analogies to their own perceptual experience.

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