The blind and visual signs
Part 1
Some of the recent studies indicate that, the blind can appreciate the use of outlines and perspectives to describe the arrangement of objects and the other surfaces. In one of my investigations, a blind woman drew a spining wheel, which took me aback. To show the motion, she drew a curved line inside the circle, and that's why I was so much surprised for. Such kind of motion line was the recent invention in history of illustration. In fact, as art scholar noted, Wilhelm Busch, a trend-setting cartoonist in nineteenth-century, until 1877s he started to the motion line in the popular figures.
When I asked other subjects of blind to draw a spinning wheel, a specular clever rendition appeared repeatedly: some of them drew the curved lines as wheel's spokes. When they were asked why they used the curved lines, all of them said that was a metaphorical way to indicate motion. But as for this, is that means curved lines are more potent than wobbling , waving, or any other kind of lines?
The answer is uncertain. So I decided to test whether different motion lines are the proper way to indicate motion, or they are merely some idiosyncratic signs. Moreover, I wanted to discover the difference between the blind and the sighted when they interpret motion lines.To search out the answers, I used protruding lines to make five pictures about the wheels, such as the wheel spoke drew curved line, bent line, waving line, broken line and line beyond the perimeter of wheel. And then I asked the eighteen blind volunteers to feel the wheels and assign them to each wheel: spinning unsteadily, spinning fast, spinning steadily, wobbling and braking. The control group of the study came from the undergraduate of Toronto University.
All but one of the blind matched the motions with the wheels. Most of the subjects believed that curving lines indicated the wheel spined steadily, and they thought that waving spokes indicated spinning unsteadily; and bent line meant that the wheel was wobbling. The subjects speculated that the line beyond perimeter indicated that the wheel braked, and broken lines suggested that the wheel was spinning fast.On the other hand, the indications the sighted liked were approximately consistent with the blind. What is more, the consensus among the sighted was hardly higher than the blind. Because the blind were unfamiliar with the motion devices, the task may be hard for them. Nevertheless, it was apparent that the blind can not only figure out the symbolised meaning of every motion lines, and the frequency of consensus they made as a group is not lower than the sighted.
Part 2
We also discovered other kinds of metaphorical visual signs. One blind woman drew a kid inside the heart, and she explained that meant the kid was surrounded by love. And then with Liu Changhong, a doctor student from China, we started to explore which level of the understanding of symbolised meaning about metaphorical shapes like the heart.
We gave the sighted subjects a list of 20 pairs of words, and asked them single out a word related to square most and a word related to circle most. For instance, we would ask, what goes with soft? Square or circle? What goes with hard?
All of the subjects deemed circle soft and quare hard.A full 94% subjects ascribed circle to happy, rather than sad. However, on the other groups of words, different ideas appeared: 79% of subjects ascribed circle to fast and square to slow, weak to circle and strong to square. Only 51% of subjects related circle with deep and square with shallow. When we took the same list to test four totally blind volunteers, their matches were almostly the same to the sighted. And a born to blind subject who did a good job, and only one match of his was distinctive, which matched far to square and near to circle. In fact, only 53% subjects thought that circle indicated far, and square indicated near. Therefore, we can draw the conclusion that the blind can appreciate abstract shapes as well as the sighted.