Braille in the Sighted: Teaching Tactile Reading to Sighted Adults.
Braille in the Sighted: Teaching Tactile Reading to Sighted Adults.
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DOI：
10.1371/journal.pone.0155394
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发表时间：
2016
期刊：
影响因子：
3.7
通讯作者：
Szwed M
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Bola Ł;Siuda-Krzywicka K;Paplińska M;Sumera E;Hańczur P;Szwed M
众所周知，盲人在其剩余感官中具有优越的感知能力。几项研究表明，这些增强取决于盲人的特定经验，他们比正常人更多地使用剩余的感官。与此观点一致的是，视力正常的受试者在接受训练后，能够在相对简单的触觉任务中取得显著进展。然而，复杂触觉任务的情况就不那么明显了，因为一些研究表明，视觉剥夺本身可能会给学习这些任务带来很大的优势。这些复杂的技能，比如盲文阅读，能在多大程度上被视力正常的人学习，目前还不清楚。在这里，我们招募了29名视力正常的成年人，其中大部分是盲文教师和教育工作者，参加了为期9个月的盲文阅读课程。在课程开始时，所有受试者都对触觉盲文阅读很幼稚。课程结束后，几乎所有人都能以平均每分钟6个单词的速度阅读整个盲文单词。低触觉敏锐度的受试者在盲文阅读速度上与其他受试者没有显著差异，这表明低触觉敏锐度不是盲文学习的限制因素，至少在学习的早期阶段是这样。我们的研究表明，只要有正确的方法和足够的动力，大多数视力正常的成年人都可以学习全字盲文阅读。因此，成人的感觉运动系统在某种程度上可以适应非常复杂的触觉任务，而不会剥夺视觉。我们组的学习速度与先天盲童和早期盲童在小学学习盲文的速度相当，这表明盲人对复杂触觉任务的掌握在很大程度上可以用经验依赖机制来解释。
Blind people are known to have superior perceptual abilities in their remaining senses. Several studies suggest that these enhancements are dependent on the specific experience of blind individuals, who use those remaining senses more than sighted subjects. In line with this view, sighted subjects, when trained, are able to significantly progress in relatively simple tactile tasks. However, the case of complex tactile tasks is less obvious, as some studies suggest that visual deprivation itself could confer large advantages in learning them. It remains unclear to what extent those complex skills, such as braille reading, can be learnt by sighted subjects. Here we enrolled twenty-nine sighted adults, mostly braille teachers and educators, in a 9-month braille reading course. At the beginning of the course, all subjects were naive in tactile braille reading. After the course, almost all were able to read whole braille words at a mean speed of 6 words-per-minute. Subjects with low tactile acuity did not differ significantly in braille reading speed from the rest of the group, indicating that low tactile acuity is not a limiting factor for learning braille, at least at this early stage of learning. Our study shows that most sighted adults can learn whole-word braille reading, given the right method and a considerable amount of motivation. The adult sensorimotor system can thus adapt, to some level, to very complex tactile tasks without visual deprivation. The pace of learning in our group was comparable to congenitally and early blind children learning braille in primary school, which suggests that the blind’s mastery of complex tactile tasks can, to a large extent, be explained by experience-dependent mechanisms.