The performance of congenitally blind children in cognitive developmental tasks

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Abstract
The study compared the performance of a group of congenitally blind children and two groups of sighted children, one of which was blindfolded and the other, visually informed. All the three groups were compared on a set of tasks, most of which have been used repeatedly to differentiate between the two developmental levels found to correspond roughly to the period of post‐infancy, early childhood and middle childhood, respectively. The purpose was to test whether: There is a developmental difference reflected in the performance of the blind group and the extent to which such a difference, if any, parallels that of the sighted groups. There is any global or task specific cognition deficit in the blind group as compared to the sighted groups. There is any difference in the performance of the sighted groups who undertook the tasks either visually or factually. Results indicate that cognitive development in the blind is not identical to that in sighted groups. Moreover, the differences in performance between groups are content or task specific and do not take the form of a global deficit across all developmental tasks. Furthermore, performance deficits are a function of both long‐term absence of experience and absence of direct or immediate visual information about the stimulus at hand.

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