Differences in cognitive map-acquisition between visually impaired and sighted persons

This study compares visually impaired and sighted persons in their use of auditory information. It was expected that sighted persons would benefit from survey-type descriptions of an environment whereas visually impaired persons would benefit from route-type descriptions. 27 visually impaired and 28 normally sighted participants listened to a survey-type or a route-type description of a fictitious zoo. Then they answered questions about spatial relations between zoo areas. These questions were both in route-type and survey-type. The descriptions were repeated twice, and each time comparable questions were answered. Visually impaired participants did not differ in error frequency between survey-type and route-type descriptions. In contrast, sighted participants were better for the survey-type than for the route-type description. Also, the learning curve for the visually impaired was steeper that for the sighted, although at the end of the third presentation they made still more errors that the sighted. Closer examination of the data revealed the existence of two sub-groups both in the group sighted and visually impaired participants. They may be called good learners and bad learners and they showed marked differences in their ability of acquiring a cognitive map from auditory descriptions of an environment