Research Report: Superior Performance of Blind Compared With Sighted Individuals on Bimanual Estimations of Object Size

Five preliminary experiments on sighted individuals revealed marked overestimation on an object size-estimation task using a bimanual response. These experiments ruled out the possibility that overestimation was due to the mode of visual presentation (whether two-dimensional or three-dimensional), the input modality (visual or kinesthetic), or the influence of other visual cues. The main experiment then investigated whether these distortions are due to visual experience by using a variant of the same task to test 24 blind and 24 sighted control participants. Remarkably, the sighted control participants overestimated object size, on average, but the blind participants did not. A follow-up experiment demonstrated that visual memory was the primary influence causing the size overestimations. We conclude that blind individuals are more accurate than sighted individuals in representing the size of familiar objects because they rely on manual representations, which are less influenced by visual experience than are visual memory representations.