부산대학교 도서관

Studies have claimed that blind people’s spatial representationsare different from sighted people, and blind people displaysuperior auditory processing. Due to the nature of auditory andhaptic information, it has been proposed that blind people havespatial representations that are more sequential than sightedpeople. Even the temporary loss of sight—such as throughblindfolding—can affect spatial representations, but not muchresearch has been done on this topic. We compared blindfoldedand sighted people’s linguistic spatial expressions and non-linguistic localization accuracy to test how blindfolding affectsthe representation of path in auditory motion events. We foundthat blindfolded people were as good as sighted people whenlocalizing simple sounds, but they outperformed sighted peoplewhen localizing auditory motion events. Blindfolded people’spath related speech also included more sequential, and lessholistic elements. Our results indicate that even temporary lossof sight influences spatial representations of auditory motionevents.