First-year architecture students are expected to utilise visuospatial abilities to generate/construct, retain, rotate and manipulate space mentally and physically through physical and digital representations. This study of 57 female and 23 male participants was conducted to investigate first-year architecture students' visuospatial abilities by…

Allocation of visual attention is crucial for encoding items into visual long-term memory. In free vision, attention is closely linked to the center of gaze, raising the question whether foveal vision loss entails suboptimal deployment of attention and subsequent impairment of object encoding. To investigate this question, we examined visual…

Introduction: This study explores blind users' unique help-seeking situations in interacting with digital libraries. In particular, help-seeking situations were investigated at both the physical and cognitive levels. Method: Fifteen blind participants performed three search tasks, including known- item search, specific information search, and…

Early visual deprivation impairs some, but not all, aspects of face perception. We investigated the possible developmental roots of later abnormalities by using a face detection task to test infants treated for bilateral congenital cataract within 1 hour of their first focused visual input. The seven patients were between 5 and 12 weeks old…

The expertise of adults in face perception is facilitated by their ability to rapidly detect that a stimulus is a face. In two experiments, we examined the role of early visual input in the development of face detection by testing patients who had been treated as infants for bilateral congenital cataract. Experiment 1 indicated that, at age 9 to…

Previous research has shown that actions impair the visual perception of categorically action-consistent stimuli. On the other hand, actions can also facilitate the perception of spatially action-consistent stimuli. We suggest that motorvisual impairment is due to action planning processes, while motorvisual facilitation is due to action control…

Loss of vision is believed to have a great impact on the acquisition of spatial knowledge. The aims of the present study are to examine the performance of individuals with visual impairments on spatial tasks and the impact of residual vision on processing these tasks. In all, 28 individuals with visual impairments--blindness or low…

Williams syndrome (WS) is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by severe impairment of visuospatial abilities. Figure-drawing abilities, which are thought to reflect visuospatial abilities, have yet to be fully investigated in WS. The purpose of the present study was to clarify whether drawing abilities differ between WS individuals and…

Previous research has revealed that a stimulus presented in the blind visual field of participants with visual hemifield defects can evoke oculomotor competition, in the absence of awareness. Here we studied three cases to determine whether a distractor in a blind hemifield would be capable of inducing a "global effect", a shift of saccade…

Four experiments investigated how readily infants achieve perceptual organization by lightness and form similarity. Infants were (a) familiarized with elements that could be organized into rows or columns on the basis of lightness or form similarity and tested with vertical versus horizontal bars depicting the familiar versus novel organization or…

In order to shed light on the needs of children with cortical visual impairments, normal visual development of infants is described. Infant preferences for motion, faces, and black-and-white patterns are explained. Colors useful in stimulating vision development and the time needed for exposure to visual stimuli are discussed. (CR)

This article reviews current knowledge about how the visual system recognizes letters and words, and the impact on reading when parts of the visual system malfunction. The physiology of eye and brain places important constraints on how we process text, and the efficient organization of the neurocognitive systems involved is not inherent but…

Through seriation, verbal seriation, and conservation tasks, investigated blind, partially sighted, and sighted children's understanding of quantity. Subjects were 81 children equally dispersed through these 3 groups. Age range was 4 to 17 years. Found similarity in concept acquisition among three groups that extended beyond quantity conservation…

The word and picture processing abilities of 11 children (ages 6-10) with partial vision were studied in a variety of ways over a period of 14 months. The studies found that in processing words partially sighted children, like fully sighted children, used both lexical and nonlexical processing, though perhaps in difference balance. Recognition and…