Recognizing pictures by touch: is visual experience necessary?

Hello everyone, I’m Francisco Lima here at the keyboard.

This text may help you who are interested in AI haptic recognition systems. It is also very enlightening for teachers of people with visual disability. I hope you all enjoy reading it.

Incidentally, when I wrote this article, the minimum wage in Brazil was ridiculously low. Now, it is still very low, but not as much as before.


Abstract

This work investigated the necessity of vision experience for the haptic recognition of raised-line drawings by comparing congenitally blind persons with late blind and blindfolded sighted subjects. It has been demonstrated that congenitally and adventitiously blind individuals are able to produce raised-line pictures and benefit from practicing with flat configurations. However, it is still uncertain whether congenitally blind people can fully understand raised-line drawings by touch, given their lack of visual experience. Totally, congenitally blind individuals proved to be capable of making sense of two-dimensional pictures, even without formal practice in drawing or touching planar configurations. Visual mediation has been proved not necessary for raised-line drawing recognition, since the groups had similar performance.

Recognizing pictures by touch: is visual experience necessary?

Introduction

When we first started our work, we faced a difficult problem: We were going to investigate picture recognition and picture making by totally, blind individuals.  However, these people not only lacked drawing experience, but also lacked appropriate materials for producing their own drawings. For the most part, sighted people have experience with maps or graphics, and the blind only rarely used them. Hence, we had a challenge before us: to develop a raised-line drawing device that enabled blind individual to make raised-line pictures by themselves.  

Thus, in the first part of this paper we describe a raised-line drawing pen developed to assist blind individuals in making maps, statistics graphics and geometric drawings, asserting that the pen will be of greater use in Brazil, since it is inexpensive and easy to use by sighted and visually impaired people.

In the second part, we present a comparative study, showing the capacity of totally, blind individuals in recognizing pictures with and without presentation of the superordinate category, and suggest that training blind people with raised-line drawing may increase the recognition of flat configurations.

Many studies have shown the ability of blind people in recognizing two-dimensional drawings and that blind people can understand raised-line pictures.  These individuals show a basic understanding of space in their drawings.

Heller and Kennedy (1990) state that if congenitally blind people are given sufficient time, they are certainly capable of generating perspective taken in a drawing, as well as capable of interpreting the perspectives (vantage point) in drawings. The authors also claim that congenitally blind people proved to be capable of making sense of complex spatial arrays, and that they seem capable of drawing imagined transformations of perspectives.  Some researchers have also stated that planar configuration can help blind individuals, e.g., communicating useful spatial information.  Millar (1976) suggested that “training with two-dimensional materials on which directions and angles may be felt in relation to one another may facilitate spatial orientation by blind children”, asserting that “It should thus begin as early as possible rather than as an adjunct only to learning geometry by older children”. Hatwell (1985) asserts that blind individuals have difficulty with geometry due to a lack of materials that enable the drawing of figures, and not because of problems with their reasoning. Despite the attention that the sense of touch has been receiving in the past years (see Schiff, W., & Foulke, E. 1982; Loomis & Lederman, 1986; Katz, 1989 and Heller, 1991), in Brazil, very little has been done or published about the tactile sense. Exceptions include studies by Zedu, Yano, Sousa and Da Silva (1992); Heller, Calcaterra, Green and Lima (1999); Lima, Heller and Da Silva,  (1998).

In a country whose minimum wage is about $65 per month, and very little is done for the education, still less is done in terms of research aiming to benefit people with some kind of mental, physical or sensorial impairment.

However, as Kim Morsley and Christopher Spencer (1991), put it “Improving the quality of life of young blind children can, in many cases, be brought about by relatively straightforward changes: these need not rely upon high technology nor upon a high input of time from teachers or parents.”

Sharing the same line of thinking as the authors we directed our attention towards developing a device that would enable blind individuals to make their own drawings, not only as a manifestation of their artistic skillfulness, but also as means of learning through two-dimensional patterns, geometry, biology, geography, statistics etc. Thus, the device would have to be inexpensive, easy to use by blind as well as by sighted people without implicating highly sophisticated technology, and produce fine, tangible raised-line drawings.

After research with different materials, shapes, weights and so on, we came to a raised-line drawing pen, the so-called model M\H.1.0 which is much cheaper than its similar products imported from outside Brazil. It is unique in that country, since no other embossing device that enables blind people to produce their own drawing is known to have been developed in Brazil. There, the methods used to teach blind individuals geometric and geographic configurations have been old-fashioned, and do not help the visually impaired people to produce their own drawings. Differently now, with the raised-line drawing pen model M\H.1.0 Brazilian children, adolescents and adults will be able to put on paper their views and impressions of the world via drawings.  This was almost impossible, or at least highly difficult before the development of this raised-line-drawing pen. Books and school materials will be able to use it to bring raised-line illustrations of maps, geometric drawings, statistics graphics and anatomic configurations of our body and of other animals.  In addition, blind people will be able to touch, for the first time, a variety of patterns so far denied to their knowledge such as the shape of the cathedral of his or her town, and the new house they are moving to. These things that seem to be so common to most of us, and that many of us seem not to pay much attention to can be for a blind person a source of great happiness.  As we have documented elsewhere, it can be of great benefit, physiological or mental and social, since drawing can be very pleasurable and/or therapeutic an activity when, for example, a child is playing with his or her buddy or when someone is training his or her touch after losing his sight due to an accident.

The pen has a special pyramidal-shape, steel edge that produces fine tangible dots (with higher or lower quality and with longer or shorter-term tangibility), depending upon the material used. Since magazine covers, written papers, some plastics and other materials can be used to make exciting raised-line drawings for and by blind people, this pen provides a joyful, costless way through which they will learn spatial relations such as size shape and distance, as well as a new language to represent a totally new limitless world of creation. 

Figure 1- Raised-line drawing pen M/H 1.0
Figure 1- Raised-line drawing pen M/H 1.0

By simply moving the pen up and down against the paper on top of an apparatus composed by a wooden support on which lays a six millimeter EVA pad (etil, vinyl, acetate, 157), the user can easily make his or her own drawing with some practice as he or she can feel with one hand the drawing he is making with the other.  Thus, besides the raised-line drawing pen the kit for drawing contains, a wooden support and an EVA pad, held by two paper holders (ruler type, marked with dots every centimeter and four bolts).

Maps and graphics can be made by teachers, parents or school friends of blind individuals or by these individuals themselves.  This will facilitate their learning, since the configurations will be in very tangible raised-line drawings.

Last, but not least, it is worth mentioning that still more important than the pen itself, it is what it produces: Drawings as a means for blind individuals to get a little closer to education, culture and art, enabling his or her freedom to show the world how this world is seen by them, and allowing them to know the world seen by sighted people. The raised-line drawing pen (M\H.1.0) is not only a school material, but also an instrument for creation and art, therefore, its limit is the limit of imagination. So, it a question of asking not what the pen can do for the blind people, but what they can do with the pen or better yet, asking not what touch can do for blind persons, but what they can do with touch. However, can blind people understand raised-line drawings by touching them?

Revesz (1950) proposed that blind individuals tend to produce visual images when they touch objects. He called it optification, that is, the production of mental images from tangible stimuli. According to the author (see Juurmaa, 1973, p 104) the haptic system provides a more limited understanding of space than the optic system. Revesz argued that vision permitted an immediate perception of more complex shapes whereas the haptic system tends to delete the details.

According to Worchel (1951) the capacity of translating tactile-kinesthetic impressions into visual images provides better results for the test of form perception, for both sighted and adventitious blind individuals.

While Lederman et al. (1990) claimed that haptics is highly accurate in recognizing 3-D objects, the same authors also state that drawings are poor representations of the 3-D configuration because they lack important characteristics inherent to that configuration. The poor representation of the drawings would diminish their recognition, and congenitally blind individuals would perform even worse than the late blind and the sighted people at recognizing them because they lacked visual experience.

These ideas led many researchers, psychologists, educators and the blind themselves to suppose that the congenitally blind individuals are unable to recognize two-dimensional pictures, for they did not have visual experience. An alternative explanation for the low performance of the totally congenitally blind individuals in the recognition of raised-line pictures is that these individuals do not have experience in the recognition of raised-line drawings.

In Heller’s 1989 study, congenitally blind subjects have not performed statistically different from the sighted in the recognition of tow-dimensional pictures. Different results were obtained in his 1996 work though.  Here, the blindfolded sighted subjects performed better than the congenitally blind and adventitiously blind, which may have been due to the use of different stimuli and to the large idiosyncrasy of the blind subjects (Heller et alii, 1996).

We attempt to address the issue that concerns the recognition of raised-line drawings by congenitally blind.

If visual experience were needed for the haptic recognition of pictures, it would be expected that sighted people would not only outperform the late blind, but also that the congenitally blind would not be capable of making sense of the drawings.  If both congenitally blind and sighted subjects had similar performance when recognizing pictures by touch this would suggest that visual imagery is not necessary for that kind of task.

Methods

Subjects

Ten totally congenitally blind, CB, observers (6 women and 4 men with median-age 29 years, varying between 18 and 49 years), ten totally late blind, LB  (7 men and 3 women, with median-age 40 years, varying between 26 and 54 years), and ten blind-folded sighted subjects, SS (7 women and 3 men with median-age 23 years, varying between 19 and 44 years), all naive for this task served as observers in this experiment.

Both late blind and congenitally blind had different kinds of visual disorders, but none of them had any other known disability other than visual impairment.

Materials and Procedure

Twelve[1] raised-line drawings (spoon, 8cm; comb, 7,5cm; guitar, 11cm; couch, 13cm; trivet, 7,5cm; trunk, 7cm; bicycle, 9cm; truck 10,5cm; banana, 10cm; apple, 3,5cm; table, 10cm and knife, 10cm) were depicted using the Swedish raised-line drawing kit[2].

Each of the drawings was displayed on a 21×15, 5cm sheet of plastic muffler. The observers were instructed to haptically recognize and name each of the pictures, before moving to the next.

The subject was informed that he or she could observe the drawing the way they wished, for as long as they wished, but could not use fingernails in order to avoid deleting the raised-lines. They were also encouraged to give a response even when they were not sure of the correct name of the depicted object.

The drawings were presented in a sequence for half of the subjects of each group, and the other way around for the others. Each of the groups examined the drawings first without category information, and then they were presented with the superordinate category before they examined each picture.

No time limit was imposed for the observation of the pictures nor was any feedback given to the subjects as to whether their answers were right or wrong. The answers were considered as correct when the expected name for the drawing was achieved. Otherwise, they were considered wrong for statistical analysis.

Results

Some subjects stated that a certain drawing could be so many things that they ended up saying they did not know what it was. Others, provided a variety of labels for the examined drawing and concluded by saying I don’t know what it is, e.g., SS9, after examining the truck, says “it is a comb, a key, a bone, I don’t know”.

Others gave different identifications for the drawing before correctly naming them, e.g., after examining the knife, CB8 says: “first I thought it was a fish, then I observed the other way around and I realized it was the knife”.   CB9 says: “There seems to be a mirror here (showing the body of the truck). No. A hairdresser? It is a truck!”, whereas LB1 says  “ there is a bunch of things here, it looks as if it is a motorbike, an animal, a flower. No, it is a bicycle.”

Some subjects described or named parts of the drawings but did not reach the correct name for it. For example, CB 7, after examining the bicycle, says there is a round part and shows the front wheel, with a rather little bent leg here (indicating the handle bar) and another round part here (and shows the back wheel).  On his turn, CC5 says: “I don’t know, it has two legs, after observing the couch. Both the couch, the drawing of the banana elicited errors of identifications much alike, for example, the banana was identified as half moon, moon, half moon with rays, by LB1, LB3 and CB4 respectively.  The couch was called bed by LB3, LB4, CB2, CB3, and SS3. The couch was also named as “headboard” (LB7); “a car seen from the front” (CB9); “a car, but there had to have wheels (SS1); the drawing of banana was called an orange sprout (LB1), a slice of watermelon (SS9), a piece of watermelon (SS3), a smile (SS7) or a handle of an umbrella (CB2).

Figure 2 and Table 1 show (in relative and absolute frequency) that visual status was not necessary for the recognition of two-dimensional pictures, since a Kruskal-Wallis Anova showed that there was no significant statistical differences among the groups LB, CB and SS, and that superordinate categorical information highly increases the performance of all groups in correctly naming drawings examined haptically.

LBNCCBWCSSNCLBWCCBNCSSWC
LBNC
CBWC*
SSNCns*
LBWC*ns*
CBNCns*ns*
SSWC*ns*ns*
Anova, Kruskal-Wallis (p< 0,001) Student-Newman-Keuls: ns - not significant; * p<0,05
Table 1-  Table of significance of visual status and categorical presentation,  affecting  drawing recognition.

Figure 3 evidences the increase of correct naming when super ordinate categorical information of a drawing is provided, whereas Table 2 presents a comparison of the groups in attempting recognition of the 12 drawings, before and after receiving superordinate categorical information presentation.

WCWCWCNCNCNC
LBCBSSLBCBSS
Spoon9109276
Comb777244
Guitar91010353
Couch436111
Trivet323111
Trunk414102
Bicycle10610851
Truck987742
Banana9108445
Apple1079946
Table999725
Knife10108465
Table 2- Influence of visual status and categorical information at drawing recognition.

Conclusion

The present data corroborates theories that say that there is no need of visual imagery or visual experience for haptic recognition of raised-line drawings by the blind. Hence it is inappropriate to generalize from the low performance of some congenitally blind people in the recognition of two-dimensional patterns, especially because this group is quite heterogeneous as can be observed in the previous studies, e. g.  Heller (1989, 1996) and the present work.

We believe that blind children should be stimulated or taught picture recognition for developing their intellectual, artistic and motor skills.  This should start as early as possible in the education of the children, since it is very likely that blind individuals would benefit from practicing with recognizing and producing drawings.

The present data also shows the influence of semantic memory to reach name agreement for two-dimensional configurations haptically recognized, suggesting that when the necessity of a more exhaustive scanning of semantic memory is diminished, For example, providing instructions and/or categories, the congenitally blind can improve their performance in recognizing two-dimensional pictures. Since these pictures are supposedly very well-known representations of common objects, thus easily recognizable by the naked eye, the recognition of these configurations by touch may be considered low in comparison with what one would expect if one observed them visually. However, by teaching the blind how to search the drawings, how 3-D configurations are depicted, and what rules govern these depictions – that can be overcome, and better performance will be certainly fulfilled.

Last, but not least, it is very important that educators and producers of educational aids for the blind do not assume the viewpoint that blind people are unable to recognize pictures by touch. On the contrary, it is recommended that they search for techniques and special devices that enable these people to understand and produce their own raised-line pictures, to develop conventions of specific modalities when necessary, matching the visual pictorial language to a haptic pictorial language or convention.

References

HATWELL, Y. (1985) Piagetian Reasoning and the Blind. New York: American Foundation for the Blind.

HELLER, M. A. (1991).  Haptic perception in blind people.  In The psychology of  touch  (pp. 239-261). M. A. Heller and W. Schiff  (Eds.), Hillsdale, NJ,  Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

HELLER, M. A.  (1989).   Picture and pattern perception in the sighted and blind: The  advantage of the late blind. Perception, 18: 379-389.

HELLER, M. A., CALCATERRA, J. A., BURSON, L. L., & TYLER, L. A.  (1996).   Tactual picture identification by blind and sighted people:  Effects of providing  categorical information. Perception & Psychophysics, 58: 310-323.

HELLER, M.,  CALCATERRA J. A.,  GREEN, S.  and  LIMA, F. J (1999)   The Effect of Orientation on Braille Recognition in Persons Who Are Sighted and  Blind. In:  Journal of  Visual Impairment  & Blindness,  no. 7, volume 93: 416-419. 

HELLER, M.A., & KENNEDY, J.M. (1990) Perspective taking, pictures and the blind. Perception & Psychophysics, 48, 459-466.

HELLER, M. A., KENNEDY, J. M., & JOYNER, T. D.  (1995).  Production and interpretation of pictures of houses by blind people.  Perception, 24: 1049-1058.

JUURMAA, J. (1973)  Transposition in mental spacial manipulation:  A theorical analysis.  American  Foundation for the  Blind:  Research Bulletin, 26: 87-134.

KATZ,  D. (1989)   The World of  Touch.  L.  E.  Krueger (Trans.),  Hillsdale, N. J.,  Erlbaum.

LEDERMAN, S. J., KLATZKY, R. L., CHATAWAY, C., & SUMMERS, C. D. (1990).  Visual mediation and the haptic recognition of two-dimensional pictures of  common objects.  Perception & Psychophysics, 47, 54-64.

LIMA, F. J.,  HELLER, M.  e  DA SILVA, J. (1998).  Recodificação da Captura Háptica de Objetos  Tangíveis Para uma Transcrição Pictórica.  Arquivos Brasileiros de Psicologia,  50- 1/2: 124- 143.

LOOMIS, J. & LEDERMAN, S. (1986). Tactual perception. In K. Boff, L. Kaufman, & J. Thomas (Eds.), Handbook of human perception and performance. New York, Wiley.

MILLAR, S. (1976)   Spatial representation by blind and sighted children. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology,  21: 460-479.

MORSLEY, K., SPENCER, C. & BAYBUTT, K. (1991).  Two techniques for encouraging movement and exploration in the visually impaired child. British Journal of Visual Impairment, 9, 75-78.

REVESZ, G.  (1950) The psychology and art of the blind.  London,  Longmans Green.

SCHIFF, W., &  FOULKE, E. (1982) Tactual perception: A sourcebook.  New York:  Cambridge University Press.

WORCHEL, P. (1951).  Space perception and orientation in the blind.  Psychological Monographs,  65: 1-28.

ZEDU,  P. M. M.,   YANO, A. M.,  SOUZA,  F. F  e    DA SILVA,  J. A. (1992).  Percepção  visual e  tatual-sinestésica de  comprimento, área e volume em observadores normais e cegos.  Psicologia: Teoria e Pesquisa.  8 (2): 253 –266.


Thank you for reading this post. If you wish, please leave your comment below. I would be very pleased to read it.


[1] The  last   6  drawings were those used in Heller’s 1996 study, and were kindly given us by the  author to be used in our work.

[2]  We ended up using the Swedish kit to depict the drawings, since we had not standardized the use of the M/H1.0 kit  for research purposes.

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