Braille in the Sighted: Teaching Tactile Reading to Sighted Adults

Abstract

Blind people are known to have superior perceptual abilities in their remaining senses. Several studies suggest that these enhancements are dependent on the specific experience of blind individuals, who use those remaining senses more than sighted subjects. In line with this view, sighted subjects, when trained, are able to significantly progress in relatively simple tactile tasks. However, the case of complex tactile tasks is less obvious, as some studies suggest that visual deprivation itself could confer large advantages in learning them. It remains unclear to what extent those complex skills, such as braille reading, can be learnt by sighted subjects. Here we enrolled twenty-nine sighted adults, mostly braille teachers and educators, in a 9-month braille reading course. At the beginning of the course, all subjects were naive in tactile braille reading. After the course, almost all were able to read whole braille words at a mean speed of 6 words-per-minute. Subjects with low tactile acuity did not differ significantly in braille reading speed from the rest of the group, indicating that low tactile acuity is not a limiting factor for learning braille, at least at this early stage of learning. Our study shows that most sighted adults can learn whole-word braille reading, given the right method and a considerable amount of motivation. The adult sensorimotor system can thus adapt, to some level, to very complex tactile tasks without visual deprivation. The pace of learning in our group was comparable to congenitally and early blind children learning braille in primary school, which suggests that the blind’s mastery of complex tactile tasks can, to a large extent, be explained by experience-dependent mechanisms.

Spectral and topological analyses of the cortical representation of the head position: Does hypnotizability matter?

“…Interestingly, a bilateral representation of the rotated position of the head was observed also at the occipital level, where beta 2, beta 3, and gamma power were influenced by the head position despite the major visual competence of this brain region. A contribution of the occipital region may be due to cross-modal sensory activation (Heimler, Striem-Amit, & Amedi, 2015) which has been observed in several experimental protocols such as sighted adults who recruit the ventral visual cortex during tactile Braille reading (Bola et al, 2016) and, for the auditory modality, congenitally deaf subjects showing activation of the auditory cortex during tactile stimulation (Levänen, Jousmäki, & Hari, 1998;Poirier et al, 2005).…”

“…Interestingly, a bilateral representation of the rotated position of the head was observed also at the occipital level, where beta 2, beta 3, and gamma power were influenced by the head position despite the major visual competence of this brain region. A contribution of the occipital region, may be due to cross‐modal sensory activation (Heimler, Striem‐Amit, & Amedi, ) which has been observed in several experimental protocols such as sighted adults who recruit the ventral visual cortex during tactile Braille reading (Bola et al., ) and, for the auditory modality, congenitally deaf subjects showing activation of the auditory cortex during tactile stimulation (Levänen, Jousmäki, & Hari, ; Poirier et al., ). Nonetheless, since the occipital increases in beta and gamma were bilateral and symmetric, we hypothesize that they could be due also to a supramodal representation of the sensory and imaginative context, independent from the specific sensory modality (Bonino et al., ; Papale, Chiesi, Rampinini, Pietrini, & Ricciardi, ).…”

The modular organization of the cerebral cortex: Evolutionary significance and possible links to neurodevelopmental conditions

“…A person who is born deaf has his/her auditory cortex coopted to process visual information. The expanded visual cortex, in this case, confers the individual with superior peripheral vision and motion detection (Bola et al, ). The attendant plasticity conferred by weak linkages helps explain the genesis of synesthesias, splinter skills and savant abilities in some minicolumnopathies.…”

Universal Visual Features Might Be Necessary for Fluent Reading. A Longitudinal Study of Visual Reading in Braille and Cyrillic Alphabets

“…Simultaneously, they took part in a tactile Braille course. Their MRI imaging results and the exact process of their tactile braille learning have been reported elsewhere (Bola et al, 2016; Siuda-Krzywicka et al, 2016, respectively). All were right-handed, fluent in Polish and had normal or corrected to normal vision.…”