A D'Angiulli
University of British Columbia, Educational and Counselling Psychology and Special Education, Vancouver, Canada
Background: Outline is typically used by sighted persons, primarily to represent perceptual effects that can be apprehended through vision. Here we report three case studies on the longitudinal spontaneous production of tactile drawings by children with congenital total blindness. Methods: Three children with congenital total blindness were observed for a period of nine months. From an initial phase in which they were tutored to draw tangible straight and curve raised-lines, the three blind children went on making spontaneous raised outlines. The children produced their drawings without feedback using Mylar plastic sheets or copper sheets and pens to make marks on the pages. The drawing activity occurred every 2 weeks for approximately 30 minutes during art classes. The drawings were rated independently by two naive judges in terms of perceptual principles depicted and recognizability (percent agreement was above .70). Results: Most of the drawings collected showed figure-ground segmentation, edges and surfaces of objects, frontal or convergent vantage point and motion. The complexity of the drawings seemed to increase with the time passed from the onset of the study. Many of the perceptual principles depicted are commonly found also in drawings that are made by children who have normal vision and that are reported in the literature on drawing development. Conclusions: The present case studies show that several aspects of outline pictures are not specific to vision. In particular, the similarities between the drawings by blind and sighted children reflect similarities in the way vision and touch mediate the acquisition and the conceptualization of spatial information from perceptual events, objects and environment. Specifically, the present findings may be explained in terms of early cross-modal plasticity and involvement of extrastriate visual cortex recruited during mental imagery to carry out tactile shape perception tasks.
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