Research On The Deficiency Compensation Of Sensation And Perception Of People With Visual Impairment

There has existed two contrary theories, "Deficiency "and "compensation", regarding the effects on other sensation and perception caused by loss of sight. This research, based on theories and researches that have been done before, makes an attempt to study and analyze the dispute of these two theories from a new aspect. The study results show that there is no significant difference in sound identification between the blind individuals and visual individuals. There is also no significant difference in Tactile-size comparison. On the other hand, blind individuals react much faster than visual individuals in Tactile-reaction time. There is also hardly any difference between blind and visual individuals in kinesthesia orientation test. Both groups, however, show consistent trend in terms of ages for the sensation and perception, those of ages from 8 to 15 have the worst, ages from 24 to 32 just slightly better, and ages from 16 to 23 the best. It is also found that gender is not the important factor affecting the sensation and perception for both groups. In the sensation test of Listening,Tactile,Kinesthesia, congenital blind and postnatal blind perform almost the same. The results of this research hence support neither deficiency theory nor compensation theory. Therefore, in this thesis, a new theory, coexistence theory, is proposed to explain the fact that both phenomena of deficiency and compensation can be found in people with visual impairments.