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

It has been argued that individuals born without sight are impaired on all “active” spatial imagery tasks (e.g., Vecchi, 1998 Vecchi, T. 1998. Visuo-spatial imagery in congenitally totally blind people. Memory, 6: 91–102. [Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). 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 Finke, R. A. and Slayton, K. 1988. Explorations of creative visual synthesis in mental imagery. Memory and Cognition, 16: 252–257. [Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). 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.