Vision is key to spatial skills

Try to conjure a mental image of your kitchen, or imagine the route that you take to work every day. For most people, this comes so naturally that we think nothing of it, but for neuroscientists, there is still much to learn about how the brain develops this critical skill, known as spatial imagery.

Sensory information from the eyes, ears, and sense of touch all contribute to our ability to imagine spatial structures, but questions remain about the influence of each sensory system. A new study from MIT neuroscientists suggests that visual input plays a special role in developing these skills, particularly for more complex tasks.

By studying children in India who were born blind but whose blindness could be treated, the researchers found that the children’s ability to perform more complex spatial imagery tasks improved markedly following surgery that restored their sight.

“Just four months of vision seems to have a significant impact on spatial imagery skills,” says Pawan Sinha, an MIT professor of brain and cognitive sciences and senior author of the paper. “That seems to be consistent with the greater richness of spatial information that vision provides. With audition and touch we get a coarser sense of the environment. With vision we have a much more fine-grained appreciation of the environment.”

The study, which appeared in a recent issue of the journal Psychological Science, grew out of Project Prakash, a charitable effort Sinha launched to identify and treat children in India suffering from curable forms of blindness, such as cataracts or corneal scarring.

Tapan Gandhi, a postdoc in Sinha’s lab, is the paper’s lead author; Suma Ganesh, an ophthalmologist at Dr. Shroff’s Charity Eye Hospital in New Delhi, is also an author.

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