Blindness Enhances Texture Perception: Role of Haptic Sense

摘要

In congenitally blind subjects, visual experience and visual imaginary is lacking which in turn forces them to be dependent on haptic system for tactile discriminative task. Many studies suggest that visual experience facilitate the haptic processing of surrounding information making sighted and late blind more efficient in haptic perception compared to congenitally blinds. When it comes to texture identification, the role of visual imaginary is not clear. In the view of this,the present study want to investigate the role of visual experience in haptic processing in congenitally blinds, when they are compared with blindfolded sighted subjects for texture discriminative task. Method: This study was done on 30 congenitally blind Braille subjects & 30 age & gender matched sighted subjects who were blindfolded during the texture discriminative task. Participants were instructed to arrange the sandpapers of different grit size from rough to smooth grading and performance was evaluated in terms of speed & accuracy. Result: Congenitally blind subjects outperformed blindfolded sighted subjects, both in terms of speed & accuracy. Conclusion: Congenitally blind subjects appear to get the benefit of their haptic sense in texture discriminative task resulting into faster & more accurate perception.