Research Article Visual Parsing After Recovery From Blindness

ABSTRACT—How the visual system comes to bind diverse image regions into whole objects is not well understood.We recently had a unique opportunity to investigate this issue when we met three congenitally blind individuals in India. After providing them treatment, we studied the early stages of their visual skills. We found that prominent fig-ural cues of grouping, such as good continuation and junction structure, were largely ineffective for image parsing. By contrast, motion cues were of profound sig-nificance in that they enabled intraobject integration and facilitated the development of object representations that permitted recognition in static images. Following 10 to 18 months of visual experience, the individuals ’ performance improved, and they were able to use the previously in-effective static figural cues to correctly parse many static scenes. These results suggest that motion information plays a fundamental role in organizing early visual expe-rience and that parsing skills can be acquired even late in life. Individuals who acquire sight late in life provide a unique window into several aspects of visual development. Such cases, however, are extremely rare; fewer than 30 have been studied in any detail over the course of the past 1,000 years (Valvo, 1971). Through a concerted effort to locate such individuals in un-derprivileged enclaves in India, a country with an estimated 25 % of the world’s blind, we have been able to conduct longi-tudinal studies from sight onset up to 18months later with 3 such patients, S.K., J.A., and P.B. These studies provide an oppor-tunity to add to this important but sparse body of work (Fine e