Standardized and Experimental Tools to Assess Spatial Cognition in Visually Impaired Children: A Mini-Review

The acquisition of spatial cognition is essential for both everyday functioning (e.g. navigation) and more specific goals (e.g. mathematics), therefore being able to assess and monitor spatial cognition from the first years of life would be essential to predict developmental outcomes and timely inte...

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Published inFrontiers in neuroscience Vol. 14; p. 562589
Main Authors Aprile, Giorgia, Cappagli, Giulia, Morelli, Federica, Gori, Monica, Signorini, Sabrina
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Lausanne Frontiers Research Foundation 16.09.2020
Frontiers Media S.A
Subjects
Animal behavior
Blindness
Braille
Children
clinical assessment
Cognition
Cognition & reasoning
Neuroscience
rehabilitation
review
Reviews
spatial cognition
visual impaired children
Visual impairment
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Summary:The acquisition of spatial cognition is essential for both everyday functioning (e.g. navigation) and more specific goals (e.g. mathematics), therefore being able to assess and monitor spatial cognition from the first years of life would be essential to predict developmental outcomes and timely intervene whenever spatial development is compromised. Several shreds of evidence have indicated that spatial development can be compromised in the case of development with atypical sensory experience such as blindness. Despite the massive importance of spatial abilities for the development of psychomotor competencies across childhood, only a few standardized and experimental methods have been developed to assess them in visually impaired children. In this review, we will give a short overview of current formal (standardized) and informal (experimental) methods to assess spatial cognition in visually impaired children, demonstrating that very few validated tools have been proposed to date. The main contribution of this current work is to highlight the need of ad-hoc studies to create and validate clinical measures to assess spatial cognition in blind individuals and address potential future developments in this area of research.
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Reviewed by: Pawel Strumillo, Lodz University of Technology, Poland; Nicholas Giudice, University of Maine, United States
This article was submitted to Perception Science, a section of the journal Frontiers in Neuroscience
Edited by: Barry Giesbrecht, University of California, Santa Barbara, United States
ISSN:1662-453X
1662-4548
1662-453X
DOI:10.3389/fnins.2020.562589