Special needs education in the blind population: effects of prior expertise in raised line drawings on blind people's cognition

In their specialized schooling, blind children are now frequently presented with raised line figures and maps. However there is still a lot to do to evaluate the cognitive effects of training using these displays. The purpose of this research is to determine if the level of prior expertise in the haptic exploration and perception of raised line materials, may enhance blind people's spatial imagery. We observed that in the three spatial tasks used in this study, the congenitally blind experts performed better than the early and late blind non experts and the early blind experts performed even better than the late blind non experts. These observations suggested that a high level of expertise in congenitally and early blind people may compensate for the impairment in spatial representation often resulting from lack of visual experience.