Low Vision, Blindness and Rehabilitation

**251**

**Chapter 15**

**Abstract**

innovation

**1. Introduction**

of the environment.

Competence

*Giulia Cappagli and Monica Gori*

The Role of Vision on Spatial

Several pieces of evidence indicate that visual experience during development is fundamental to acquire long-term spatial capabilities. For instance, reaching abilities tend to emerge at 5 months of age in sighted infants, while only later at 10 months of age in blind infants. Moreover, other spatial skills such as auditory localization and haptic orientation discrimination tend to be delayed or impaired in visually impaired children, with a huge impact on the development of sighted-like perceptual and cognitive asset. Here, we report an overview of studies showing that the lack of vision can interfere with the development of coherent multisensory spatial representations and highlight the contribution of current research in designing new tools to support the acquisition of spatial capabilities during childhood.

**Keywords:** blindness, visual impairment, child development, rehabilitation,

Spatial competence is essential in everyday life for numerous human activities, as it entails the ability to understand and internalize the representation of the structure, entities, and relations of space with respect to one's own body [1, 2]. Despite the fact that spatial competence encompasses a diverse set of skills, research in the field has generally focused on identifying the developmental steps that are necessary to acquire from an early age the ability to reason about spatial properties

There is a general consensus on the crucial role of visual experience in guiding the maturation of spatial competence [3]. Vision takes advantages respect to other senses in encoding spatial information because it ensures the simultaneous perception of multiple stimuli in the environment despite the apparent motion of the array on the retina during locomotion enabling us to extract more invariant spatial properties from the surrounding layout [4, 5]. Indeed psychophysical data indicate that when sensorial conflict occurs, audition and touch are strongly biased by simultaneously presented visuospatial information, suggesting that sighted people tend to organize spatial information according to a visual frame of reference [6–12]. Neurophysiological data further confirm the view by suggesting that the visual feedback is fundamental for spatial learning [13–18], i.e., visual experience allows the alignment and thus the integration of auditory and visuospatial cortical maps [19–22]. Thus, research on sighted individuals suggests that vision typically provides the most accurate and reliable information about the spatial properties
