scholarly journals Shared understanding of color among congenitally blind and sighted adults

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Judy Sein Kim ◽  
Brianna Aheimer ◽  
Veronica Montane Manrara ◽  
Marina Bedny
Keyword(s):  
Visual Experience ◽  
Natural Kinds ◽  
Shared Understanding ◽  
Linguistic Communication ◽  
Causal Explanations ◽  
Stop Sign ◽  
Congenitally Blind ◽  
Novel Objects ◽  
Blind Individuals

Empiricist philosophers such as Locke famously argued that people born blind could only acquire shallow, fragmented facts about color. Contrary to this intuition, we report that blind and sighted people share an in-depth understanding of color, despite disagreeing about arbitrary color facts. Relative to the sighted, blind individuals are less likely to generate ‘yellow’ for banana and ‘red’ for stop-sign. However, blind and sighted adults are equally likely to infer that two bananas (natural kinds) and two stop-signs (artifacts with functional colors) are more likely to have the same color than two cars (artifacts with non-functional colors), make similar inferences about novel objects’ colors, and provide similar causal explanations. We argue that people develop inferentially-rich and intuitive “theories” of color regardless of visual experience. Linguistic communication is more effective at aligning people’s theories than their knowledge of verbal facts.

scholarly journals Shared understanding of color among sighted and blind adults

2021 ◽  
Vol 118 (33) ◽  
pp. e2020192118
Author(s):  
Judy Sein Kim ◽  
Brianna Aheimer ◽  
Verónica Montané Manrara ◽  
Marina Bedny
Keyword(s):  
Visual Experience ◽  
Natural Kinds ◽  
Shared Understanding ◽  
Linguistic Communication ◽  
Causal Explanations ◽  
Causal Understanding ◽  
Stop Sign ◽  
Novel Objects ◽  
Blind Individuals

Empiricist philosophers such as Locke famously argued that people born blind might learn arbitrary color facts (e.g., marigolds are yellow) but would lack color understanding. Contrary to this intuition, we find that blind and sighted adults share causal understanding of color, despite not always agreeing about arbitrary color facts. Relative to sighted people, blind individuals are less likely to generate “yellow” for banana and “red” for stop sign but make similar generative inferences about real and novel objects’ colors, and provide similar causal explanations. For example, people infer that two natural kinds (e.g., bananas) and two artifacts with functional colors (e.g., stop signs) are more likely to have the same color than two artifacts with nonfunctional colors (e.g., cars). People develop intuitive and inferentially rich “theories” of color regardless of visual experience. Linguistic communication is more effective at aligning intuitive theories than knowledge of arbitrary facts.

scholarly journals Niewidzenie a kompetencje pragmatyczne w komunikacji

2019 ◽  
pp. 189-210
Author(s):  
Kornelia Czerwińska ◽  
Agnieszka Piskorska
Keyword(s):  
Reading Comprehension ◽  
Foreign Language ◽  
Visual Experience ◽  
Educational Development ◽  
Pragmatic Competence ◽  
Linguistic Terms ◽  
Comprehension Task ◽  
Congenitally Blind ◽  
Blind Individuals ◽  
Basic Level

The paper argues that gaps in knowledge attested in congenitally blind individuals may negatively affect their performance in foreign language tasks testing reading comprehension. Characteristics of a blind learner at various stages of cognitive and educational development are presented, with focus on gaps in knowledge resulting from sight impairment. The concept of pragmatic competence is first explained generally in reference to communication and then it is applied to a case of a comprehension task taken from an EFL exam (Polish “matura”, basic level). An analysis of the text indicates that despite being relatively simple in linguistic terms, comprehension tasks may pose a significant processing challenge to blind students due to a large amount of implicitly communicated information dependent on visual experience.

scholarly journals Visual experience is not necessary for the development of face-selectivity in the lateral fusiform gyrus

2020 ◽  
Vol 117 (37) ◽  
pp. 23011-23020 ◽  
Author(s):  
N. Apurva Ratan Murty ◽  
Santani Teng ◽  
David Beeler ◽  
Anna Mynick ◽  
Aude Oliva ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Visual Experience ◽  
Fusiform Gyrus ◽  
Fusiform Face Area ◽  
Face Area ◽  
Haptic Exploration ◽  
Cortical Responses ◽  
Congenitally Blind ◽  
Face Selectivity ◽  
3D Printed ◽  
Blind Individuals

The fusiform face area responds selectively to faces and is causally involved in face perception. How does face-selectivity in the fusiform arise in development, and why does it develop so systematically in the same location across individuals? Preferential cortical responses to faces develop early in infancy, yet evidence is conflicting on the central question of whether visual experience with faces is necessary. Here, we revisit this question by scanning congenitally blind individuals with fMRI while they haptically explored 3D-printed faces and other stimuli. We found robust face-selective responses in the lateral fusiform gyrus of individual blind participants during haptic exploration of stimuli, indicating that neither visual experience with faces nor fovea-biased inputs is necessary for face-selectivity to arise in the lateral fusiform gyrus. Our results instead suggest a role for long-range connectivity in specifying the location of face-selectivity in the human brain.

scholarly journals Absence of visual experience modifies the neural basis of numerical thinking

2016 ◽  
Vol 113 (40) ◽  
pp. 11172-11177 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shipra Kanjlia ◽  
Connor Lane ◽  
Lisa Feigenson ◽  
Marina Bedny
Keyword(s):  
Sentence Comprehension ◽  
Visual Experience ◽  
Numerical Cognition ◽  
Neural Basis ◽  
Frontoparietal Network ◽  
Dorsolateral Prefrontal ◽  
Congenitally Blind ◽  
Visual Cortices ◽  
Math Calculation ◽  
Blind Individuals

In humans, the ability to reason about mathematical quantities depends on a frontoparietal network that includes the intraparietal sulcus (IPS). How do nature and nurture give rise to the neurobiology of numerical cognition? We asked how visual experience shapes the neural basis of numerical thinking by studying numerical cognition in congenitally blind individuals. Blind (n = 17) and blindfolded sighted (n = 19) participants solved math equations that varied in difficulty (e.g., 27 − 12 = x vs. 7 − 2 = x), and performed a control sentence comprehension task while undergoing fMRI. Whole-cortex analyses revealed that in both blind and sighted participants, the IPS and dorsolateral prefrontal cortices were more active during the math task than the language task, and activity in the IPS increased parametrically with equation difficulty. Thus, the classic frontoparietal number network is preserved in the total absence of visual experience. However, surprisingly, blind but not sighted individuals additionally recruited a subset of early visual areas during symbolic math calculation. The functional profile of these “visual” regions was identical to that of the IPS in blind but not sighted individuals. Furthermore, in blindness, number-responsive visual cortices exhibited increased functional connectivity with prefrontal and IPS regions that process numbers. We conclude that the frontoparietal number network develops independently of visual experience. In blindness, this number network colonizes parts of deafferented visual cortex. These results suggest that human cortex is highly functionally flexible early in life, and point to frontoparietal input as a mechanism of cross-modal plasticity in blindness.

scholarly journals Neural basis of approximate number system develops independent of visual experience

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shipra Kanjlia ◽  
Lisa Feigenson ◽  
Marina Bedny
Keyword(s):  
Visual Experience ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Number System ◽  
Approximate Number System ◽  
Neural Basis ◽  
Neuronal Populations ◽  
Number Representations ◽  
Population Codes ◽  
Congenitally Blind ◽  
Blind Individuals

AbstractThinking about numerical quantities is an integral part of daily human life that is supported by the intraparietal sulcus (IPS). The IPS is recruited during mathematical calculation and neuronal populations within the IPS code for the quantity of items in a set. Is the developmental basis of IPS number representations rooted in visual experience? We asked if the IPS possesses population codes for auditory quantities in sighted individuals and, critically, whether it does in the absence of any visual experience in congenitally blind individuals. We found that sequences of 4, 8, 16 and 32 tones each elicited unique patterns of fMRI activity in the IPS of both sighted and congenitally blind individuals, such that the quantity a participant heard on a given trial could be reliably predicted based on the pattern of observed IPS activity. This finding suggests that the IPS number system is resilient to dramatic changes in sensory experience.

scholarly journals Knowledge of animal appearance among sighted and blind adults

2019 ◽  
Vol 116 (23) ◽  
pp. 11213-11222 ◽  
Author(s):  
Judy S. Kim ◽  
Giulia V. Elli ◽  
Marina Bedny
Keyword(s):  
Color Analysis ◽  
Skin Texture ◽  
Linguistic Communication ◽  
Folk Taxonomy ◽  
Congenitally Blind ◽  
Appearance Properties ◽  
Physical Features ◽  
Blind Individuals ◽  
Open Question ◽  
Color And Light

How does first-person sensory experience contribute to knowledge? Contrary to the suppositions of early empiricist philosophers, people who are born blind know about phenomena that cannot be perceived directly, such as color and light. Exactly what is learned and how remains an open question. We compared knowledge of animal appearance across congenitally blind (n = 20) and sighted individuals (two groups, n = 20 and n = 35) using a battery of tasks, including ordering (size and height), sorting (shape, skin texture, and color), odd-one-out (shape), and feature choice (texture). On all tested dimensions apart from color, sighted and blind individuals showed substantial albeit imperfect agreement, suggesting that linguistic communication and visual perception convey partially redundant appearance information. To test the hypothesis that blind individuals learn about appearance primarily by remembering sighted people’s descriptions of what they see (e.g., “elephants are gray”), we measured verbalizability of animal shape, texture, and color in the sighted. Contrary to the learn-from-description hypothesis, blind and sighted groups disagreed most about the appearance dimension that was easiest for sighted people to verbalize: color. Analysis of disagreement patterns across all tasks suggest that blind individuals infer physical features from non-appearance properties of animals such as folk taxonomy and habitat (e.g., bats are textured like mammals but shaped like birds). These findings suggest that in the absence of sensory access, structured appearance knowledge is acquired through inference from ontological kind.

Picture and Pattern Perception in the Sighted and the Blind: The Advantage of the Late Blind

Perception ◽  
1989 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 379-389 ◽  
Author(s):  
Morton A Heller
Keyword(s):  
Shape Matching ◽  
Visual Experience ◽  
Pattern Perception ◽  
Pictorial Representation ◽  
Line Drawings ◽  
Congenitally Blind ◽  
History Of ◽  
Blind Individuals ◽  
Picture Identification ◽  
Better Than

Two experiments are reported on the contribution of visual experience to tactile perception. In the first experiment, sighted, congenitally blind, and late blind individuals made tactual matches to tangible embossed shapes. In the second experiment, the same subjects attempted tactile identification of raised-line drawings. The three groups did not differ in the accuracy of shape matching, but both groups of blind subjects were much faster than the sighted. Late blind observers were far better than the sighted or congenitally blind at tactile picture identification. Four of the twelve pictures were correctly identified by most of the late blind subjects. The sighted and congenitally blind performed at comparable levels in picture naming. There was no evidence that visual experience alone aided the sighted in the tactile task under investigation, since they performed no better than did the early blind. The superiority of the late blind suggests that visual exposure to drawings and the rules of pictorial representation may help tactile picture identification when combined with a history of tactual experience.

scholarly journals The size-weight illusion is unimpaired in individuals with a history of congenital visual deprivation

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Rashi Pant ◽  
Maria J. S. Guerreiro ◽  
Pia Ley ◽  
Davide Bottari ◽  
Idris Shareef ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Visual Experience ◽  
Multisensory Processing ◽  
Visual Deprivation ◽  
Congenital Cataracts ◽  
Congenitally Blind ◽  
History Of ◽  
Set Up ◽  
Weight Illusion ◽  
Blind Individuals ◽  
Similar Task

AbstractVisual deprivation in childhood can lead to lifelong impairments in multisensory processing. Here, the Size-Weight Illusion (SWI) was used to test whether visuo-haptic integration recovers after early visual deprivation. Normally sighted individuals perceive larger objects to be lighter than smaller objects of the same weight. In Experiment 1, individuals treated for dense bilateral congenital cataracts (who had no patterned visual experience at birth), individuals treated for developmental cataracts (who had patterned visual experience at birth, but were visually impaired), congenitally blind individuals and normally sighted individuals had to rate the weight of manually explored cubes that differed in size (Small, Medium, Large) across two possible weights (350 g, 700 g). In Experiment 2, individuals treated for dense bilateral congenital cataracts were compared to sighted individuals in a similar task using a string set-up, which removed haptic size cues. In both experiments, indistinguishable SWI effects were observed across all groups. These results provide evidence that early aberrant vision does not interfere with the development of the SWI, and suggest a recovery of the integration of size and weight cues provided by the visual and haptic modality.

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