When the body is time: spatial and temporal deixis in children with visual impairments and sighted children.
Blind kids use their own body as the reference frame for abstract spatial and temporal concepts—build tactile-body anchors into instruction.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Iossifova et al. (2013) watched blind, low-vision, and sighted kids point to where or when things happen.
The task was simple: hear a word like "here" or "yesterday" and point to the matching spot on a board.
They timed the points to see which group used space and time in different ways.
What they found
Sighted kids pointed fast to places and slower to time words.
Blind kids were the slowest and pointed to their own body parts for both space and time.
The body became their map; shoulder meant "past," chest meant "here."
How this fits with other research
Battistin et al. (2019) later tested the same kids on hearing short and long beeps.
They found blind kids were more accurate but also more variable in their timing, so the body-map skill comes with extra noise.
Withagen et al. (2013) showed blind ten-year-olds beat sighted peers on verbal memory tasks.
Together the three papers say: teach blind learners with clear words and let them touch their own body as a clock or ruler.
Why it matters
If you work with a blind learner, give them a tactile-body anchor for "before," "after," "here," and "far."
Let them tap their chest for "now" or move a finger along their arm for "past to future."
Build in extra wait time after you ask a time question; their answer may need a moment to travel from body map to mouth.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
While there is mounting evidence explaining how concrete concepts are processed, the evidence demonstrating how abstract concepts are processed is rather scant. Most research illustrating how concrete and abstract concepts are processed has been obtained from adult populations. Consequently, not much is known about how these concepts are processed by children, especially those with sensorimotor impairments. This paper reports a study in which groups of children who were either visual-motor impaired (VMG), blind (BG), or sighted (CG) were requested to perform deictic gestures for temporal and spatial concepts. The results showed that: (i) spatial pointing was performed faster than temporal pointing across all groups of children; (ii) such difference in pointing times occurred also within groups; and (iii) the slowest pointing times were those of the blind children followed by the VMG and the CG children, respectively. Additionally, while CG children correctly performed the pointing tasks, VMG and, particularly, BG children relied on a form of deixis known as autotopological (or personal) deixis. The results thus suggest that deprivation or lack of sensorimotor experience with the environment affects the processing of abstract concepts and that a compensatory mechanism may be to rely on the body as a reference frame.
Research in developmental disabilities, 2013 · doi:10.1016/j.ridd.2013.03.030