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The development of audio and tactile space representations in blind children and toddlers

Fri, March 22, 3:00 to 4:30pm, Baltimore Convention Center, Floor: Level 3, Room 349

Integrative Statement

To interact with the environment we need to build a coherent spatial representation: different sensory signals (such as visual, auditory and tactile) need to be integrated within a unique coordinate system. Visual experience is crucial for the development of coherent spatial representations, and the absence of this experience in blind children interferes with their development. In agreement with this idea, recent works show that although some acoustic and tactile spatial skills are enhanced in blind individuals (e.g. Voss et al., 2004, Roder et al., 1999, Roder et al., 2007, Lessard et al., 1998) some others are impaired (e.g. Vercillo et al., 2015, Gori et al., 2014, Finocchietti et al., 2015). To date, it is not clear how these spatial skills develop in blind and low vision children and how visual experience shapes the development of common multisensory and sensory-motor spatial representations. To address this topic, we have recently investigated the development of audio, tactile and multisensory spatial skills in sighted, blind and low vision children, between 3 and 15 years of age. For the audio condition, children performed a set of tasks involving static and dynamic sounds (presented in azimuth, elevation, and depth). For what concerns the development of tactile spatial skills children performed a set of tasks, such as tactile orientation discrimination, tactile size discrimination, and arm-movement reproduction. For what concerns the development of multisensory audio-tactile spatial skills, children performed tasks involving the integration and the cross-sensory association between audio and tactile proprioceptive signals. Results show that blind and low vision children are impaired in some of the audio and tactile spatial skills that are enhanced in blind and low vision adults. Moreover, they show different integration and interaction capabilities relying more on the body than on external spatial signals. These results suggest that visual experience is crucial for the development of unisensory audio and tactile spatial representations and their multisensory integration. An important question is whether it possible to improve these skills with specific rehabilitation training. Previous works have shown that in sighted children the development of space representation is strictly related to the link between body movements and visual feedback. By 5 months of age, sighted infants start to watch movements of their own hands and reach out towards interesting objects. The onset of this successful sensory-motor association likely mediates the effects of visual experience on spatial representations in the sighted infant (Bremner et al., 2008). When the visual information is unavailable, the natural visual sensory feedback associated with body movement, and crucial for the development of space-representation, is missing. We investigated whether a new sensory-motor training based on audio-tactile-motor feedback associated with body movement can be used to improve spatial representation in blind and low vision children. 42 children between 3 and 15 years of age participated in 3 months of rehabilitation training with the new device. Results suggest that it possible to use audio feedbacks associated with arm movement (e.g. small audio speakers positioned on the child's wrist) to rehabilitate space representation in blind children.

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