The authors review their work on the role of attentional variables, such as in exploratory hand movements, selection and pickup of haptic shape information in the education of blind students. Efforts to design a technology to permit unobtrusive study of hand movements during braille reading and to link observed differences in scanning to reading…

All Ss' accuracy decreased with increasing task difficulty. Accuracy of nonretarded Ss did not differ as a function of visual status. Blind retarded Ss were more accurate than were sighted retarded Ss. (Author)

A cell-by-cell analysis of finger movements of 16 blind adolescent braille readers was conducted to separate, catalog, and measure the components of scanning movements across braille cells as a function of reading proficiency. Results confirmed the superiority of bimanual reading and suggested that the two hands may perform different functions.…

The results showed that accuracy depended on both stimulus complexity, modality, and mental age, regardless of whether or not the Ss were retarded. The selection of haptic search styles also depended on these factors but, in addition, was influenced by the intellectual status of the children. (Author/DLS)

This experiment compared retarded and normal subjects at different developmental levels on visual (V) and haptic (H) matching tasks. Systematic observations of variables known to have developmentally linked effects on accuracy, including stimulus complexity and haptic exploratory search style, were made. Seventeen mentally retarded subjects, with…