Enhancing general spatial skills of young visually impaired people with a programmable distance discrimination training: a case control study.
Fabrizio Leo, Elisabetta Ferrari, Caterina Baccelliere and 5 others
PMID 31462262WHAT IT FOUND
Four weeks of one-hour weekly distance discrimination training on a tactile display improved spatial skills in blind children.
The training transferred to untrained tasks like size discrimination and shape memory. Severely visually impaired children also improved, but the transfer effects were less clear in this group.
Key findings
01Blind participants who received the training showed significant improvements in the overall Haptic-2D battery scores compared to controls, specifically in size discrimination and shape span tests.
02Severely visually impaired participants improved in distance discrimination accuracy and speed during the training, but did not show significant improvement in the size discrimination subtest of the general battery, likely due to a ceiling effect.
03The training involved identifying the closest and farthest squares on a refreshable tactile display, with difficulty adjusted weekly by increasing the number of squares to maintain a challenge.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for OTs
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What it does not show
The study design is a case-control study, not a randomized controlled trial, which limits the certainty of the causal link between the training and the outcomes. The severely visually impaired group did not show the same transfer effects as the blind group, possibly due to ceiling effects in their baseline performance. The control groups continued with standard rehabilitation, so the results reflect the added value of the specific training rather than the training in isolation. The sample size is relatively small (n=47 total), and the age range is wide (7-22 years), which may introduce variability. The improvements in the blind group's subtests were significant before correction for multiple comparisons but lost significance after FDR correction in some cases (e.g., size discrimination p FDR-corrected = 0.088).
Declared interests
Funded by the EU FP7 STREP project. No other conflicts of interest were declared.
The easy way to misread this
Do not assume this training will produce the same transfer effects in all visually impaired children. The study found significant improvements in blind children but not in severely visually impaired children for key subtests like size discrimination, possibly because the latter group started with higher baseline skills.