How ageing and blindness affect egocentric and allocentric spatial memory

Abstract

Egocentric (subject-to-object) and allocentric (object-to-object) spatial reference frames are fundamental for representing the position of objects or places around us. The literature on spatial cognition in blind people has shown that lack of vision may limit the ability to represent spatial information in an allocentric rather than egocentric way. Furthermore, much research with sighted individuals has reported that aging has a negative impact on spatial memory. However, as far as we know, no study has assessed how ageing may affect the processing of spatial reference frames in individuals with different degrees of visual experience. To fill this gap, here we report data from a cross-sectional study in which a large sample of young and elderly participants (tot. 160) who were congenitally blind (long-term visual deprivation), adventitiously blind (late onset of blindness), blindfolded sighted (short-term visual deprivation) and sighted (full visual availability) performed a spatial memory task that required egocentric/allocentric distance judgments with regard to memorized stimuli. The results showed that egocentric judgments were better than allocentric ones and above all that the ability to process allocentric information was influenced by both age and visual status. Specifically, the allocentric judgments of congenitally blind elderly participants were worse than those of all other groups. These findings suggest that aging and congenital blindness can contribute to the worsening of the ability to represent spatial relationships between external, non-body-centered anchor points.

Lack of Visual Experience Affects Multimodal Language Production: Evidence From Congenitally Blind and Sighted People

“…We also found that blind speakers had more pointing gestures to posited landmarks in gesture space than sighted speakers. Taken together, this is in line with previous studies that find blind people rely more on egocentric than allocentric frames of reference when learning spatial layouts (e.g., Cattaneo & Vecchi, 2011;Iachini et al, 2014;Pasqualotto & Proulx, 2012;Ruggiero et al, 2021). Thus, our results provide further linguistic evidence for the use of an egocentric frame of reference in the spatial language (see also Iverson, 1999;Iverson & Goldin-Meadow, 1997).…”

“…Accordingly, they found that gesture frequency decreases with segmented path descriptions (i.e., "when path is broken up into a series of locations" on p. 463, Iverson and Goldin-Meadow, 1997), particularly when the spatial layout is large-scale and includes multiple paths (Iverson, 1999). This is corroboratory evidence from language that spatial cognition in blind people is more sequential than in sighted people (e.g., Cattaneo & Vecchi, 2011;Iachini et al, 2014;Noordzij et al, 2006;Pasqualotto & Proulx, 2012;Ruggiero et al, 2021;Thinus-Blanc & Gaunet, 1997;Vercillo et al, 2018), and lack of visual experience may shape spatial language via altered spatial representations.…”

Brain morphometric changes in congenitally blind subjects: a 7 Tesla MRI study

“…80 Our finding of a volumetric reduction in Crus I is therefore in line with the well-known association of impairments in spatial navigation capabilities with congenital blindess. 81 However, other plausible interpretations include the involvement of Crus I in language and executive functions such as working memory and planning, 82 which are affected in CB individuals. 5 In addition, a recent 7T fMRI study showed that the cerebellum contains whole-body somatotopic maps in which the eyes are represented in lobules VI, VIIb and Crus I.…”

Neural substrates of spatial processing and navigation in blindness: An activation likelihood estimation meta-analysis

“…However, other studies suggests that EB exhibit impairments in auditory and proprioceptive spatial perception (Cappagli et al, 2017) and have deficits in many spatial tasks such as sound localization in the vertical plane (Zwiers et al, 2001;Lewald, 2002), auditory spatial bisection (Gori et al, 2014(Gori et al, , 2020 and motion encoding (Finocchietti et al, 2015). Furthermore, other studies showed that even though EB can form and use spatial representations, they fail to achieve the same level of proficiency than LB and SC (Fortin et al, 2006b;Pasqualotto and Newell, 2007;Ruggiero et al, 2018Ruggiero et al, , 2021. Hence, there is no consensus on the abilities and deficits of blind individuals, as they seem to vary depending on the chosen paradigms and testing conditions (Schinazi et al, 2016;Giudice, 2018).…”

“…This may lead to delays in the development of spatial abilities in the blind who rely more frequently on egocentric frames of reference (based on the subject’s viewpoint) instead of allocentric ones (independent from the individual’s perspective). Blind individuals therefore often prefer route-based strategies rather than cognitive map-based, or “survey knowledge,” strategies that are more prone to error in this population ( Passini and Proulx, 1988 ; Millar, 1994 ; Thinus-Blanc and Gaunet, 1997 ; Ungar et al, 1997 ; Espinosa et al, 1998 ; Pasqualotto and Proulx, 2012 ; Iachini et al, 2014 ; Giudice, 2018 ; Ruggiero et al, 2021 ).…”