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Visually-Impaired Touch

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Abstract

Blind individuals rely on their sense of touch for pattern perception, much as the rest of us depend on vision. If a blind person has extra training in the use of touch for tasks such as Braille or spatial orientation, then we might expect increased skill as a consequence. This is the sensory compensation hypothesis, and there is evidence that practice can aid touch (Sathian, Neurology 54(12): 2203–2204. 2000).

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Eastern Illinois University, Illinois, USA

    Morton Heller

  2. Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia, Madrid, Spain

    Soledad Ballesteros

Authors
  1. Morton Heller
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  2. Soledad Ballesteros
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Dept. of Psychology, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, United Kingdom

    Tony Prescott

  2. Department of Neurobiology, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel

    Ehud Ahissar

  3. Brain Corporation, San Diego, California, USA

    Eugene Izhikevich

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Heller, M., Ballesteros, S. (2016). Visually-Impaired Touch. In: Prescott, T., Ahissar, E., Izhikevich, E. (eds) Scholarpedia of Touch. Scholarpedia. Atlantis Press, Paris. https://doi.org/10.2991/978-94-6239-133-8_32

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.2991/978-94-6239-133-8_32

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