Installation Art Piece to Simulate What a Blind Person Sees
How the Bullheaded Draw
Bullheaded and sighted people use many of the aforementioned devices in
sketching their surroundings, suggesting that vision and touch
are closely linked
by John M. Kennedy
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| Blind ARTISTS, such as Tracy (above), rely on their sense of bear upon to render familiar objects. Tracy lost all sight to retinal cancer at the age of 2, but by feeling the glass, she determines its shape. By rubbing the newspaper, placed on a slice of felt, she knows where her pen has scored the folio and left a mark. Because the lines in about uncomplicated drawings reveal surface dges—features that are discerned by touching as readily as they are by sight—drawings by the bullheaded are easily recognized by sighted people. |
I first met Betty, a blind teenager in Toronto, every bit I was interviewing participants for an upcoming study of mine on impact perception in 1973. Betty had lost her sight at age two, when she was too immature to accept learned how to draw. And so I was astonished when she told me that she liked to draw profiles of her family unit members. Earlier I began working with the blind, I had always thought of pictures as copies of the visible world. Afterwards all, we do not draw sounds, tastes or smells; we draw what we see. Thus, I had causeless that bullheaded people would accept little interest or talent in creating images. But every bit Betty's comments revealed that day, I was very incorrect. Relying on her imagination and sense of touch, Betty enjoyed tracing out the distinctive shape of an individual's face on paper.
I was and so intrigued past Betty'southward ability that I wanted to find out if other bullheaded people could readily make useful illustrations— and if these drawings would be anything similar the pictures sighted individuals utilize. In addition, I hoped to discover whether the bullheaded could interpret the symbols normally used by sighted people. To bring the blind into the flat, graphical world of the sighted, I turned to a number of tools, including models, wire displays and, most often, raised-line cartoon kits, made available by the Swedish Organization for the Bullheaded. These kits are basically potent boards covered with a layer of rubber and a thin plastic sheet. The pressure from any ballpoint pen produces a raised line on the plastic canvass.
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| OUTLINE DRAWINGS, made by Kathy, totally blind since age three, demonstrate that blind artists utilize many of the same devices equally sighted illustrators do. They use lines to represent surfaces, as Kathy's picture of the hawkeye on her amuse bracelet shows (top). Blind people portray objects, such as a business firm, from a unmarried vantage point (2nd from top). Blind artists use shapes to convey abstract letters: Kathy drew a heart surrounding a crib to draw the love surrounding a child (third from summit). And they use foreshortening to suggest perspective: Kathy drew the L-shaped block and the cube to be the aforementioned size when they were side by side merely made the cube smaller when it was placed farther away from her (bottom). |
Thanks to this equipment, my colleagues and I have made some remarkable findings over the past 20 years, and this information has revised our understanding of sensory perception. Well-nigh significantly, we have learned that blind and sighted people share a course of pictorial shorthand. That is, they adopt many of the same devices in sketching their surround: for instance, both groups utilize lines to stand for the edges of surfaces. Both apply foreshortened shapes and converging lines to convey depth. Both typically portray scenes from a single vantage betoken. Both render extended or irregular lines to connote move. And both use shapes that are symbolic, though not always visually correct, such as a heart or a star, to relay abstruse messages. In sum, our work shows that even very bones pictures reflect far more than meets the eye.
Outlines
After meeting Betty, I wondered whether all bullheaded people could appreciate facial profiles shown in outline. Over the years, I asked blind volunteers in North America and Europe to depict profiles of several kinds of objects. Most recently, I undertook a series of studies with Yvonne Eriksson of Linköping Academy and the Swedish Library of Talking Books and Braille. In 1993 we tested nine adults from Stockholm—3 men and half-dozen women. Four were congenitally blind, three had lost their sight later on the age of three, and two had minimal vision. Each subject examined four raised profiles, which Hans-Joergen Andersen, an undergraduate psychology student at Aarhus University in Denmark, made by gluing thin, plastic-coated wires to a apartment metal board.
Eriksson and I asked the volunteers to describe the near prominent characteristic on each display using one of four labels: smile, curly hair, bristles or large nose. Five of them—including one man who had been totally blind since birth—correctly identified all iv pictures. Simply one participant recognized none. On boilerplate, the group labeled two.eight of the 4 outlines accurately. In comparison, when 18 sighted undergraduates in Toronto were blindfolded and given the same raised-line profiles, they scored merely slightly better, matching up a mean of 3.1 out of 4 displays.
Many investigators in the U.Due south., Japan, Norway, Sweden, Spain and the U.Thousand. have reported similar results, leaving niggling doubt that blind people can recognize the outline shape of familiar objects. At offset, it may seem odd that even those who have never had any vision whatsoever possess some intuitive sense of how faces and other objects appear. But with farther thought, the finding makes perfect sense. The lines in most simple drawings prove one of 2 things: where two surfaces overlap, called an occluding edge, or where two surfaces meet in a corner. Neither characteristic need be seen to be perceived. Both tin can be discerned by touching.
Not all blind people read raised-line drawings equally well, and these private discrepancies can reverberate the age at which someone lost his or her sight.
For example, people who have been blind from nascency or infancy—termed the early blind—sometimes find raised-line drawings challenging. But in 1993 Yatuka Shimizu of Tsukuba College of Engineering science in Japan, with colleagues Shinya Saida and Hiroshi Shimura, found that 60 percent of the early-blind subjects they studied could recognize the outline of mutual objects, such as a fish or a canteen. Recognition rates were somewhat higher for sighted, blindfolded subjects, who are more familiar with pictures in general.
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| PROFILES, made from plastic-coated wires mounted on a thin metal board, were given to nine blind subjects in Stockholm. The subjects were asked to describe each display using one of 4 labels: smile, curly hair, beard or large nose. On boilerplate, the grouping described two.8 of the 4 displays accurately, showing that blind people often recognize the outline of unproblematic objects. Blindfolded, sighted control subjects given the same task did only slightly ameliorate. |
Interestingly, subjects who lose vision after in life—called the afterward bullheaded—frequently interpret raised outlines more than readily than either sighted or earlyblind individuals do, according to Morton Heller of Winston-Salem University. One likely caption is that the later blind have a double advantage in these tasks: they are typically more familiar with pictures than are the early bullheaded, and they have much better tactile skills than do the sighted.
Perspective
Just as Betty prompted me to report whether the blind appreciate profiles in outline, another apprentice artist, Kathy from Ottawa, led me to investigate a dissimilar question. Kathy first participated in my studies when she was 30 years old. Considering of retinal cancer detected during her start year of life, Kathy had been totally blind since age iii and had never had detailed vision. Yet, she was quite good at making raised-line drawings. On one occasion Kathy sketched several different arrangements of a cube and an L-shaped cake that I used to test how relative distances appear in line art. When the blocks sat adjacent, she made them the same size—as they were in actuality. Merely when the cube was farther from her than the other block, she made information technology smaller in her drawing.
This second drawing revealed a fundamental principle of perspective—namely, that as an object becomes more afar, it subtends a smaller angle. (Think about viewing a scout fence at an angle and how its posts appear shorter closer to the horizon.) Kathy'southward employ of this basic rule suggested that some aspects of perspective might be readily understood by the blind. Once again the proposition seemed reasonable, given some consideration. Only as we see objects from a item vantage indicate, then, too, exercise we reach out for them from a certain spot. For proof of the theory, I designed a study with Paul Gabias of Okanagan University College in British Columbia, who was then at New York University.
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| SOLIDS—a sphere, a cone and a cube— arranged on a table are commonly used to examination spatial power. The arrangement is shown from overhead at the bottom. Which drawing above shows the solids from the edge of the table facing the bottom of the page? Which drawing shows them from the contrary edge? From the border facing left? Facing right? Bullheaded and sighted individuals do equally well on this task, proving that the bullheaded can determine how objects appear from particular vantage points. |
We prepared v raised-line drawings: ane of a table and iv of a cube. Nosotros showed the drawings to 24 congenitally blind volunteers and asked them a series of questions. The table drawing had a central foursquare and four legs, one protruding from each corner. The subjects were told that a blind person had drawn the tabular array and had explained, "I've drawn it this mode to show that it is symmetrical on all four sides." They were then told that another bullheaded person had drawn an identical table but had offered a different caption: "I've shown information technology from underneath in order to show the shape of the pinnacle and all four legs. If you show the table from in a higher place or from the side, you can't really bear witness the top and all 4 legs, also."
Next we asked our volunteers to pick out the cube drawing that had nigh probable been made by the person who drew the table from below. To answer consistently, they needed to understand what strategy had been used in drawing the table and each cube. One cube resembled a foldout of a box, showing the front face of the cube in the middle, surrounded by its top, bottom, left and right faces. Another drawing showed two squares, representing the forepart and top of the cube. A 3rd moving-picture show depicted the front of the cube as a square and the pinnacle as a rectangle—foreshortened considering it was receding abroad from the observer.
A fourth illustrated ii trapeziums joined along the longest line; the actress length of this line revealed that information technology was the border nearest to the observer. Which cube do you lot think was drawn by the person who intended to show the table from below? Nearly of the blind volunteers chose the drawing that showed 2 trapeziums. That is, they selected the illustration that fabricated the most sophisticated utilize of perspective. Accordingly, they picked equally the least likely match the flat "foldout" drawing—the one that used no perspective whatsoever. The foldout drawing was also the one they judged most likely to have been made by the person who, in drawing the table, had hoped to highlight its symmetry.
Heller and I joined forces to gear up another job for demonstrating that the blind understood the utilise of perspective. (Yous might like to try it, too.) Nosotros arranged three solids—a sphere, a cone and a cube—on a rectangular tabletop. Our blind subjects sat on i side. We asked them to draw the objects from where they were sitting and and then to imagine four different views: from the other 3 sides of the table and from direct above besides. (Swiss child psychologist Jean Piaget chosen this exercise the perspective-taking, or "3 mountains," task.) Many adults and children find this trouble quite difficult. On average, however, our blind subjects performed as well as sighted control subjects, drawing iii.4 of the five images correctly.
Next, we asked our subjects to name the vantage point used in 5 separate drawings of the three objects. We presented the drawings to them twice, in random social club, so that the highest possible score was ten correct. Of that total, the blind subjects named an boilerplate of 6.7 correctly. Sighted subjects scored merely a fiddling higher, giving 7.5 correct answers on boilerplate. The nine later-blind subjects in the study fared slightly better than the congenitally blind and the sighted, scoring four.2 on the drawing job and 8.iii on the recognition task. Again, the afterward bullheaded probably scored and so well because they have a familiarity with pictures and enhanced tactile skills.
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| PERSPECTIVE is readily understood by the blind. To evidence this point, the author and Paul Gabias of Okanagan University College asked 24 congenitally blind volunteers to examine a drawing of a table (far left) and four drawings of a cube. They were told that one blind person drew the table in a star shape to evidence how it appeared from underneath and that some other blind person drew an identical table, intending to testify its symmetry instead. The subjects were so asked which cube was near likely drawn past the person who drew the tabular array from underneath. Most chose the cube composed of two trapeziums (far right), the one that fabricated the most sophisticated use of perspective. |
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| MOTION can exist suggested by irregular lines. When blind and sighted volunteers were shown five diagrams of moving wheels (above), they by and large interpreted them in the same manner. Most guessed that the curved spokes indicated that the bicycle was spinning steadily; the wavy spokes, they thought, suggested that the wheel was wobbling; and the aptitude spokes were taken equally a sign that the wheel was jerking. Subjects assumed that spokes extending beyond the cycle'south perimeter signified that the bike had its brakes on and that dashed spokes indicated that the cycle was spinning apace. |
Metaphor
From the studies described to a higher place, information technology is clear that blind people can capeesh the utilise of outlines and perspective to depict the arrangement of objects and other surfaces in space. Simply pictures are more than literal representations. This fact was fatigued to my attention dramatically when a bullheaded woman in i of my investigations decided on her own initiative to draw a wheel as it was spinning. To bear witness this motion, she traced a curve inside the circle. I was taken ashamed. Lines of motility, such equally the one she used, are a very recent invention in the history of illustration. Indeed, as fine art scholar David Kunzle notes, Wilhelm Busch, a trendsetting 19th-century cartoonist, used virtually no movement lines in his popular figures until about 1877.
When I asked several other blind study subjects to depict a spinning cycle, i especially clever rendition appeared repeatedly: several subjects showed the wheel'southward spokes as curved lines. When asked nigh these curves, they all described them as metaphorical ways of suggesting movement. Majority rule would argue that this device somehow indicated move very well. But was information technology a meliorate indicator than, say, broken or wavy lines—or whatever other kind of line, for that affair? The answer was not clear. So I decided to test whether various lines of move were apt ways of showing movement or if they were but idiosyncratic marks. Moreover, I wanted to discover whether there were differences in how the blind and the sighted interpreted lines of move.
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| Word PAIRS were used to examination the symbolism in abstruse shapes—and whether blind and sighted people perceived such meanings in the same way. Subjects were told that in each pair of words, i fit all-time with circle and the other with square. For example, which shape better describes soft? Co-ordinate to the number given after the soft-hard word pair, everyone idea a circle did. These percentages prove the level of consensus among sighted subjects. Blind volunteers made similar choices. |
To search out these answers, Gabias and I created raised-line drawings of five different wheels, depicting spokes with lines that curved, bent, waved, dashed and extended across the perimeter of the bicycle. We so asked 18 bullheaded volunteers to assign 1 of the post-obit motions to each bicycle: wobbling, spinning fast, spinning steadily, jerking or braking. Which cycle practise you think fits with each movement? Our control group consisted of 18 sighted undergraduates from the University of Toronto.
All but one of the bullheaded subjects assigned distinctive motions to each cycle. In addition, the favored clarification for the sighted was the favored clarification for the blind in every example. What is more, the consensus among the sighted was barely higher than that among the blind. Because motility devices are unfamiliar to the blind, the task we gave them involved some problem solving. Evidently, all the same, the bullheaded not only figured out meanings for each line of motion, merely every bit a group they by and large came upward with the same meaning—at least as frequently as did sighted subjects.
Nosotros take plant that the bullheaded sympathize other kinds of visual metaphors also. Kathy once drew a child's crib inside a center—choosing that symbol, she said, to prove that love surrounded the child. With Chang Hong Liu, a doctoral educatee from Red china, I have begun exploring how well blind people understand the symbolism behind shapes such equally hearts, which do not direct represent their significant. Nosotros gave a list of twenty pairs of words to sighted subjects and asked them to pick from each pair the term that best related to a circle and the term that best related to a foursquare. (If you wish to try this yourself, the listing of words can be found at the left.) For case, we asked: What goes with soft? A circumvolve or a foursquare? Which shape goes with hard?
All our subjects deemed the circle soft and the square hard. A full 94 percentage ascribed happy to the circumvolve, instead of sad. But other pairs revealed less agreement: 79 percent matched fast and ho-hum to circumvolve and square, respectively. And but 51 percent linked deep to circle and shallow to foursquare. When nosotros tested four totally blind volunteers using the same listing, we plant that their choices closely resembled those fabricated by the sighted subjects. 1 homo, who had been blind since nascency, scored extremely well. He fabricated but one match differing from the consensus, assigning "far" to foursquare and "near" to circle. In fact, only a small majority of sighted subjects—53 per centum—had paired far and near to the opposite partners. Thus, we concluded that the blind interpret abstract shapes as sighted people do.
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| THICKNESS of these outlines determines whether their two contours are viewed as 1 profile or two. The same ambiguity occurs with touch. Blind subjects translate raised edges placed near each other as a single surface boundary and those placed farther apart as two. |
Perception
We typically recall of sight as the perceptual organization by which shapes and surfaces speak to the heed. But as the empirical prove discussed above demonstrates, affect tin relay much of the same information. In some ways, this finding is not so surprising. When we encounter something, we know more or less how it will feel to the touch, and vice versa. Yet, touch and sight are two very different senses: i receives input in the course of pressure, and one responds to changes in light. How is it that they can then translate something as unproblematic every bit a line in exactly the same manner? To respond this question, nosotros must consider what kind of data it is that outlines impart to our senses.
The most obvious theory is that each border in a basic drawing represents one concrete boundary effectually some surface or shape. But it is not that elementary, considering all lines, no affair how thin, have ii sides or contours—an inside and an outside border, if you will. As a effect, thick lines are perceived quite differently from sparse ones. Consider a thick line tracing a profile. If it is thick enough, it appears to show two profiles, ane per edge, gazing in the same direction [see analogy]. When the line is thin and its ii borders are shut together, though, an observer perceives only i face. As information technology turns out, touch produces a like effect. I prepared a series of profile drawings in which both edges of the defining line were raised. When the edges were but 0.one centimeter autonomously, my blind volunteer, Sanne, a student at Aarhus Academy, said they showed i face up. When they were 0.8 centimeter apart, she reported that they showed two faces.
Some other theory of outline drawings suggests that lines substitute for any perceptible boundary, including those that are not tangible, such as shadows. Just this theory, besides, fails in a very telling fashion. Look at the illustration at the right, which shows ii pictures of the writer. In one epitome, shadow patterns, defined by a single contour separating lite and dark areas, cross my face. In the 2d image, a dark line having two contours traces the same shadow patterns. Despite the fact that the shapes in the 2d moving picture are identical to those in the first, the perceptual results are vividly different. The showtime is easily recognized as a face; the second is not.
Once again, this example shows that our visual system, like our tactile organization, does not read two contours of a line in the aforementioned way as it interprets a single contour. The implication is that the brain region responsible for interpreting contours in sensory input from busy environments is a general surface-perception system. Equally such, information technology does not discriminate on the ground of purely visual matters, such as brightness and colour. Rather it takes the two contours of a dark line and treats them as indicators for the location of a single border of some surface. Whereas sighted individuals treat brightness borders equally indicators of surface edges, the blind treat pressure borders in the same style.
Because the principles at work here are non simply visual, the encephalon region that performs them could exist called multimodal or, as it is more than commonly termed, amodal. In ane account, which I have discussed in my volume on drawings past the blind, such an amodal organization
receives input from both vision and touch. The organization considers the input as information well-nigh such features equally occlusion, foreground and groundwork, flat and curved surfaces, and vantage points. In the case of the sighted, visual and tactile signals are coordinated by this amodal system.
As nosotros have found, the ability to interpret surface edges functions even when it does not receive any visual signals. Information technology is for this very reason that the blind and then readily capeesh line drawings and other graphic symbols. Knowing this fact should encourage scholars and educators to fix materials for the blind that make vital use of pictures. Several groups around the world are doing just that. For instance, Art Beyond Sight, an organisation associated with the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Modern Fine art in New York City, has prepared raised-line versions of Henri Matisse paintings and of cavern art. It may non be long before raised pictures for the blind are too known as Braille texts.
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| SHADOWS, and other intangible boundaries, are non recognizable in outline—explaining in part why the blind can empathise nearly line drawings made past sighted people. In the flick of the author on the left, a single contour separates light and dark areas of his face. In the picture on the right, a line, having two contours, makes the aforementioned division. Note that although the shapes are identical in both images, the perceptual results are quite unlike. Simply the image on the left clearly resembles a confront. |
The Writer
JOHN Grand. KENNEDY was born in Belfast in 1942 and was raised in one of the few Unitarian families in Northern Republic of ireland. He attended the Royal Belfast Academical Establishment and Queen's University of Belfast, where his interests included fencing and theater. He completed his Ph.D. in perception at Cornell Academy and began his research with the blind shortly thereafter as an assistant professor at Harvard University. He currently lectures at the University of Toronto, Scarborough College, where he won his college'southward teaching prize in 1994. Notes from his courses on perception are available through the university'due south Globe Wide
Spider web site at
http://citd.scar.utoronto.ca/Psychology/PSYC54/PSYC54.html
Farther Reading
Picture and Pattern Perception in the Sighted and the Blind: The Advantage of the Belatedly Blind. M. A. Heller in Perception, Vol. xviii, No. 3, pages 379–389; 1989.
Drawing and the Blind: Pictures to Bear on. J. Yard. Kennedy. Yale Academy
Press, 1993.
Profiles and Orientation of Tactile Pictures. J. M. Kennedy and Y. Eriksson. Paper presented at the coming together of the European Psychology Society, Tampere, July 2–5, 1993.
Symbolic Forms and Cognition. C. H. Liu and J. Thou. Kennedy in Psyke & Logos, Vol. xiv, No. ii, pages 441–456; 1993.
Tactile Pattern Recognition by Graphic Brandish: Importance of three-D Information for Haptic Perception of Familiar Objects. Y. Shimizu, S. Saida and H. Shimura in Perception and Psychophysics, Vol. 53, No. 1, pages 43–48; Jan 1993.
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Source: http://www.artbeyondsight.org/teach/how-blind-draw.shtml?lan=English
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