Spatial processing, mental imagery, and creativity in individuals with and without sight

Abstract

It has been argued that individuals born without sight are impaired on all “active” spatial imagery tasks (e.g., Vecchi, 1998). If this were the case, people without sight would be limited in their capacity to manipulate, amalgamate, or reorganise information within imagery. A consequence of this would be a difficulty in creating novel forms using imagery alone, which is the basis of the mental synthesis task (Finke & Slayton, 1988). This potential difficulty is investigated by exploring the performance of 12 early blind individuals and 15 blindfolded-sighted participants on both two- and three-dimensional versions of the mental synthesis task. Results indicated that, irrespective of visual status, spatial interference was detrimental to performance on the mental synthesis task. Furthermore, although those with sight performed better than those without sight in two dimensions, vision provided no performance advantage on the three-dimensional version of this task. In other words, individuals without sight are not impaired on all complex spatial tasks.

This work was completed whilst the first author was supported by an ESRC Doctoral studentship (R42200124139). We would like to thank all those who kindly participated in this experiment. Many thanks also to RNIB New College for all the effort that they went to accommodate this research. Thank you to the RNIB, Guide Dogs for the Blind, and National Library for the Blind for their assistance in participant recruitment. Thanks also to Dr Alan Pickering for his assistance with some of the statistical analysis. Finally, thanks to Dr Pam Heaton and Dr Michel Denis for their useful comments on earlier drafts of this paper. Part of the data presented here has previously appeared in a chapter entitled “Creative discoveries in mental imagery: The role of spatial processing in individuals with and without sight”, in S. Ballesteros Jiménez and M. A. Heller (Eds.) (2003), Touch, Blindness and Neuroscience, UNED Ediciones.

Notes

¹Finke (1990) devised a three-dimensional “creative invention” task but the basic principle of the task differed in as much as individuals were asked to make up a new object with its own use.

²A photographic image of all the shapes is available from the first author, upon request.

³It should be noted that although the tap data was recorded technical difficulties resulted in the data not being analysable. However, in view of the fact that Pearson et al. (1999) failed to find any difference in their tap data results, this was not felt to be problematic.

⁴Data was analysed both with and without the two participants who were not totally blind from birth (see Table 1). Excluding participants 5 and 11 resulted in the main effect of vision losing significance. Had early visual experience played a significant role in the visual imagery ability of those participants who were blind from infancy, the consequence of excluding them from analysis should have been to maintain if not strengthen the effect of vision, not weaken it. In the face of this, it was considered most appropriate to include these participants in subsequent analyses.