Haptic Object Recognition is View-Independent in Early Blind but not Sighted People

Occelli, Valeria; Lacey, Simon; Stephens, Careese; John, Thomas; Sathian, K.

doi:10.1177/0301006615614489

Cited by 6 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 41 publications

(73 reference statements)

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…They stated that the tactus is a crucial sense, which can be used to substitute for vision. Results of the experiments conducted by Occelli et al [58] show that people with early-onset blindness reflect greater haptic sensitivity than the sighted. They also validated the hypothesis that people losing vision early can recognize objects by their haptic perception regardless of spatial transformations.…”

Section: Tactusmentioning

confidence: 94%

An Overview of Assistive Devices for Blind and Visually Impaired People

Hu¹,

Chen²,

Zhai³

et al. 2019

International Journal of Robotics and Automation

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Across the world, there are approximately 253 million people with vision impairments, and assistive devices have constantly been in demand. Advanced research has led to the development of numerous assistive devices for blind people and visually impaired people (VIP) to improve their quality of life. An overview of these different types of assistive devices such as canes, glasses, hats and gloves is presented in this survey. A FCBPSS (F: function, C: context, B: behaviour, P: principle, S: state, S: structure) architecture of visual impairment assistance system is preliminarily proposed to allow other researchers to design the assistive devices with the good experience and the high performance for blind people and VIPs in the future. As VIPs and blind people may have different behaviour patterns, a criterion for classifying different types of vision impairments is presented. Subsequently, we classify the substitutive senses for visual perception into five categories: vision enhancement, audition, somatosense, visual prosthesis, and olfactory and gustation. Two commonly used feedback forms, namely audition and vibration, are elaborated.Based on literature survey, we also present a summary prospective of the development of assistive devices: add more sensing and feedback modules, use the knowledge of perception mechanism and behaviour pattern as the design guideline and design more reliable validation experiments.

show abstract

Section: Tactusmentioning

confidence: 94%

An Overview of Assistive Devices for Blind and Visually Impaired People

Hu¹,

Chen²,

Zhai³

et al. 2019

International Journal of Robotics and Automation

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…So far, the available evidence with blind adults has yielded conflicting results. On one side, several studies documented that blind people, when directly asked, can learn and are able to correctly use various geometric concepts such as symmetry or mental rotations (Bauer et al, 2015;Carpenter & Eisenberg, 1978;Cattaneo et al, 2014Cattaneo et al, , 2010Marmor & Zaback, 1976;Occelli, Lacey, & Sathian, 2016). These results show that blind adults can successfully acquire geometric foundations via touch, but whether they use the same geometric intuitions as sighted individuals to drive haptic spatial grouping and similarity judgments remain an open question.…”

Section: Fig 1 Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…However, several previous studies showed that blind participants do possess and can successfully master the geometric concepts which they failed to spontaneously detect in the current work. For instance, blind participants succeeded in perceiving symmetry relations when directly comparing symmetrical and non-symmetrical figures (Bauer et al, 2015;Cattaneo et al, 2014Cattaneo et al, , 2010 and in performing mental rotations under more focused experimental conditions (Carpenter & Eisenberg, 1978;Marmor & Zaback, 1976;Occelli et al, 2016). Some of these studies even showed that the neural representations of certain features such as symmetry are shared between the blind and sighted populations (Bauer et al, 2015).…”

Section: Differences Between Visual and Tactile Geometrical Explorationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Core knowledge of geometry can develop independently of visual experience

et al. 2021

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Geometrical intuitions spontaneously drive visuo-spatial reasoning in human adults, children and animals. Is their emergence intrinsically linked to visual experience, or does it reflect a core property of cognition shared across sensory modalities? To address this question, we tested the sensitivity of blind-from-birth adults to geometrical-invariants using a haptic deviant-figure detection task. Blind participants spontaneously used many geometric concepts such as parallelism, right angles and geometrical shapes to detect intruders in haptic displays, but experienced difficulties with symmetry and complex spatial transformations. Across items, their performance was highly correlated with that of sighted adults performing the same task in touch (blindfolded) and in vision, as well as with the performances of uneducated preschoolers and Amazonian adults. Our results support the existence of an amodal core-system of geometry that arises independently of visual experience. However, performance at selecting geometric intruders was generally higher in the visual compared to the haptic modality, suggesting that sensory-specific spatial experience may play a role in refining the properties of this core-system of geometry."In geometry, what is essential is invisible to the eye: it is only with the mind that one can see rightly" (Emmanuel Giroux, blind mathematician).Philosophers have debated the emergence of geometric knowledge in human cognition for centuries (Descartes, 1886;Kant, 1998;Plato, 2005): is one born a geometric thinker or is such a skill a result of formal education? This debate continues also in our times. For example, many studies consistently documented that geometric properties such as parallelism, collinearity, or curvilinearity play a crucial role in visual perception, because these properties define special "non-accidental" configurations that drive visual perceptual and spatial grouping (Amir, Biederman,

show abstract

“…This performance degradation is visible in the sighted regardless of the sense involved in recognition, that is vision or touch ( Lacey et al, 2007 ). On the contrary, Occelli et al (2016) showed that in the congenitally blind object recognition is view-independent, that is accuracy is not affected by the rotation of the learned object. Another result of this study is that overall no difference in performance between blind and sighted was observed.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 98%

Early blindness modulates haptic object recognition

Leo

Gori²,

Sciutti³

2022

Front. Hum. Neurosci.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Haptic object recognition is usually an efficient process although slower and less accurate than its visual counterpart. The early loss of vision imposes a greater reliance on haptic perception for recognition compared to the sighted. Therefore, we may expect that congenitally blind persons could recognize objects through touch more quickly and accurately than late blind or sighted people. However, the literature provided mixed results. Furthermore, most of the studies on haptic object recognition focused on performance, devoting little attention to the exploration procedures that conducted to that performance. In this study, we used iCube, an instrumented cube recording its orientation in space as well as the location of the points of contact on its faces. Three groups of congenitally blind, late blind and age and gender-matched blindfolded sighted participants were asked to explore the cube faces where little pins were positioned in varying number. Participants were required to explore the cube twice, reporting whether the cube was the same or it differed in pins disposition. Results showed that recognition accuracy was not modulated by the level of visual ability. However, congenitally blind touched more cells simultaneously while exploring the faces and changed more the pattern of touched cells from one recording sample to the next than late blind and sighted. Furthermore, the number of simultaneously touched cells negatively correlated with exploration duration. These findings indicate that early blindness shapes haptic exploration of objects that can be held in hands.

show abstract

Haptic Object Recognition is View-Independent in Early Blind but not Sighted People

Cited by 6 publications

References 41 publications

An Overview of Assistive Devices for Blind and Visually Impaired People

An Overview of Assistive Devices for Blind and Visually Impaired People

Core knowledge of geometry can develop independently of visual experience

Early blindness modulates haptic object recognition

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About