To study the effect of visual condition on performance of a balancing task, 48 children ages 8 to 10 and 12 to 14 who were totally blind, legally blind, sighted, and blindfolded sighted were tested on a stabilometer during two sessions held approximately one month apart. Each session included 20 trials with the feet perpendicular to the stabilometer's axle and 20 with the feet parallel to the axle. According to the results, a hierarchy of motor performance exists among older children: Sighted 12-to-14-year-olds performed best, followed by the totally blind, blindfolded legally blind and, finally, sighted blindfolded children. Thus a developmental trend may exist in the ability to use proprioceptive information. If this ability can be learned, it may become a valuable adjunct to mobility programs for the visually impaired.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.