Recollective experience in individuals with a visual impairment: the role of sensory and conceptual processing

Abstract

A series of studies was carried out designed to investigate the proposal that visually impaired people tend to encode auditory input primarily in terms of sensory features at the expense of non-sensory semantic features. The first two studies investigated recollective experience in blind adolescents of words that differed in terms of imageability. In Experiment 1 participants were presented with high and low visual imageability words. During the subsequent recognition test they were asked to indicate whether their recognition judgements were based on recollection ("remember" responses) or familiarity ("know" responses). The results indicated that, while the number of remember responses was greater than know responses overall, recollective experience did not interact with imageability. Experiment 2 found the same pattern of performance using words that differed in terms of auditory imageability. Experiment 3 investigated memory for one aspect of sensory input, i.e. voice pitch, by testing recall for whether items had been presented by a male or a female. The results indicated superior performance on the part of individuals with visual impairment relative to sighted controls. Experiment 4 provided evidence that recall in individuals with visual impairment did not differ for semantically related and semantically unrelated words. The overall findings, therefore, were consistent with the view that individuals with visual impairment place more reliance on data-driven than conceptual processing, although the role of introspections of memories needs to be explored further.