Retention of Movement Cues by Visually Impaired Persons

Abstract

Describes the results of an experiment which examined whether kinesthetic movement information in a short memory paradigm of visually impaired persons was superior to that of sighted individuals. It was expected that visually impaired subjects would have developed a more sophisticated and refined kinesthetic modality and thus would produce less absolute and variable error than that of the sighted subjects on a movement retention task. It was found that the visually impaired and sighted subjects were equally effective in using the kinesthetic system to retain distance and location cues but the visually impaired subjects were significantly more variable in movement reproduction than were sighted subjects.