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Vision matters for shape representation: Evidence from sculpturing and drawing in the blind
Poster Session C, Friday, October 25, 4:30 - 6:00 pm, Great Hall 3 and 4
Shuang Tian1, Lingjuan Chen1, Xiaoying Wang1, Guochao Li1, Ze Fu1, Yufeng Ji4,5, Jiahui Lu1, Xiaosha Wang1, Shiguang Shan4,5, Yanchao Bi1,2,3; 1State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning & IDG, McGovern Institute for Brain Research, Beijing Normal University, Beijing 100875, China, 2Beijing Key Laboratory of Brain Imaging and Connectomics, Beijing Normal University, Beijing 100875, China, 3Chinese Institute for Brain Research, Beijing 102206, China, 4Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100190, China, 5University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, China
Shape is a property that could be perceived by vision and touch, and is classically considered to be supramodal. While there is mounting evidence for the shared cognitive and neural representation space between visual and tactile shape, previous research tended to rely on dissimilarity structures between objects and had not examined the detailed properties of shape representation in the absence of vision. To address this gap, we conducted three explicit object shape knowledge production experiments with congenitally blind and sighted participants, who were asked to produce verbal features, 3D clay models, and 2D drawings of familiar objects with varying levels of tactile exposure, including tools, large nonmanipulable objects, and animals. We found that the absence of visual experience (i.e., in the blind group) led to stronger differences in animals than in tools and large objects, suggesting that direct tactile experience of objects is essential for shape representation when vision is unavailable. For tools with rich tactile/manipulation experiences, the blind produced overall good shapes comparable to the sighted, yet also showed intriguing differences. The blind group had more variations and a systematic bias in the geometric property of tools (making them stubbier than the sighted), indicating that visual experience contributes to aligning internal representations and calibrating overall object configurations, at least for tools. Taken together, the object shape representation reflects the intricate orchestration of vision, touch and language.
Topic Areas: Multisensory or Sensorimotor Integration,