Mental Manipulation, Thus Recognition of Familiar Shapes: The Influence of Pre-cuing When Touch Replaces Vision as the Dominant Sense Modality

Abstract

The present study investigated whether newly blinded individuals, i.e., when touch replaces vision as the dominant sense modality, show improved proficiency (operationalized as accuracy and exploration time) in mental (unfamiliar shape) manipulation, thus recognition of familiar shapes, when they are (1) visually and (2) tactually pre-cued. Explicitly, would pre-cuing, or prompting of experiences stored prior to total sight loss, improve their proficiency in mentally manipulating unfamiliar tactile shapes, i.e., subtracting, relocating, etc. familiar features and thereby, based on this mental (unfamiliar shape) manipulation, recognizing familiar shapes? Two experiments were conducted to investigate the influence of two separate precursors, i.e., preliminary training aimed at pre-cuing: Experiment 1. a visual precursor (pre-cuing prior to total sight loss) and Experiment 2. a tactual precursor (pre-cuing after total sight loss). Experiment 1 examined 32 newly blinded (i.e., blindfolded-sighted) individuals...