How Persons with Visual Impairments Explore Novel Spaces: Strategies of Good and Poor Performers

The study presented here examined the videotaped search patterns and strategies that 65 persons with visual impairments used to locate and learn the arrangement of five objects in a novel space. Videotapes of the 15 best-performing and 15 worst-performing participants’ explorations were then compared to the participants’ verbal self-reports of the strategies they used. The best-performing participants used search patterns and strategies that were effective in locating objects quickly and that facilitated the development of object-to-object relationships.