Spatial Mapping of Familiar Locations in Blind Children

This article reports on a 15-month study of the spatial mapping skills of totally blind, visually impaired, and normally sighted children. The children were asked to point to familiar locations in four areas (conditions) in and around their homes. The blind children never mastered all the conditions; the visually impaired children mastered them, but one of them did so over a year after the sighted children did so; and the sighted children easily mastered all the conditions. The results suggest that blindness interferes with the development of spatial knowledge in which Euclidean directions between locations are known.