A Guide to Planning and Support for Individuals who are Deafblind

A Guide to Planning and Support for Individuals who are Deafblind PDF Author: John M. McInnes
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 9780802042422
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 598

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Book Description
Leading experts address such problems as identification of deafblindness, planning and intervention, development, family support, and education for parents and professionals who work with people who have been deafblind from birth or a very early age.

A Guide to Planning and Support for Individuals who are Deafblind

A Guide to Planning and Support for Individuals who are Deafblind PDF Author: John M. McInnes
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 9780802042422
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 598

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Book Description
Leading experts address such problems as identification of deafblindness, planning and intervention, development, family support, and education for parents and professionals who work with people who have been deafblind from birth or a very early age.

Blind Vision

Blind Vision PDF Author: Zaira Cattaneo
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262549883
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 285

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Book Description
An investigation of the effects of blindness and other types of visual deficit on cognitive abilities. Can a blind person see? The very idea seems paradoxical. And yet, if we conceive of "seeing" as the ability to generate internal mental representations that may contain visual details, the idea of blind vision becomes a concept subject to investigation. In this book, Zaira Cattaneo and Tomaso Vecchi examine the effects of blindness and other types of visual deficit on the development and functioning of the human cognitive system. Drawing on behavioral and neurophysiological data, Cattaneo and Vecchi analyze research on mental imagery, spatial cognition, and compensatory mechanisms at the sensorial, cognitive, and cortical levels in individuals with complete or profound visual impairment. They find that our brain does not need our eyes to "see." Cattaneo and Vecchi address critical questions of broad importance: the relationship of visual perception to imagery and working memory and the extent to which mental imagery depends on normal vision; the functional and neural relationships between vision and the other senses; the specific aspects of the visual experience that are crucial to cognitive development or specific cognitive mechanisms; and the extraordinary plasticity of the brain—as illustrated by the way that, in the blind, the visual cortex may be reorganized to support other perceptual or cognitive funtions. In the absence of vision, the other senses work as functional substitutes and are often improved. With Blind Vision, Cattaneo and Vecchi take on the "tyranny of the visual," pointing to the importance of the other senses in cognition.

Visuo-spatial Working Memory and Individual Differences

Visuo-spatial Working Memory and Individual Differences PDF Author: Cesare Cornoldi
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 1135431213
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
In this timely and comprehensive text, Cesare Cornoldi and Tomaso Vecchi describe their recently developed experimental approach to the investigation of visuo-spatial cognition, based upon the analysis of individual differences. A review of the most influential theoretical advances in the study of visuo-spatial cognition is presented, including both critical analysis and comparisons between the distinct approaches. In addition, the authors describe recent research into memory for spatial configurations, mental manipulation and the active integration of visuo-spatial information. This includes studies on the effects of congenital blindness on mental imagery abilities, developmental and age-related modifications, gender effects, and the role of genetic syndromes in determining visuo-spatial abilities. The authors draw together these distinct areas of research and integrate the findings within an innovative framework of working memory. This text will be a valuable resource for advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students of psychology, as well as researchers in the fields of cognitive psychology, neuropsychology and neuroscience.

Wayfinding Behavior

Wayfinding Behavior PDF Author: Reginald G. Golledge
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 9780801859939
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 460

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Book Description
The metaphor of a "cognitive map" has attracted interest since the 1940s. Researchers from many fields have explored how humans process and use spatial information, why they make errors or not. This text brings together contributors from diverse fields to explore the

Learning to Think Spatially

Learning to Think Spatially PDF Author: National Research Council
Publisher: National Academies Press
ISBN: 0309092086
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 333

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Book Description
Learning to Think Spatially examines how spatial thinking might be incorporated into existing standards-based instruction across the school curriculum. Spatial thinking must be recognized as a fundamental part of Kâ€"12 education and as an integrator and a facilitator for problem solving across the curriculum. With advances in computing technologies and the increasing availability of geospatial data, spatial thinking will play a significant role in the information-based economy of the twenty-first century. Using appropriately designed support systems tailored to the Kâ€"12 context, spatial thinking can be taught formally to all students. A geographic information system (GIS) offers one example of a high-technology support system that can enable students and teachers to practice and apply spatial thinking in many areas of the curriculum.

Touch and Blindness

Touch and Blindness PDF Author: Morton A. Heller
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 1135619301
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 395

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Book Description
Research on touch and blindness has undergone rapid transformation in recent years, with dramatic developments in technology designed to provide assistance to those who are blind, and advancements in robotics that demand haptic interfaces. Touch and Blindness approaches the study of the topic from the perspectives of psychological methodology and the most sophisticated, state-of-the-art techniques in neuroscience. This book, edited by well-known leaders in the field, is derived from the discussions presented by speakers at a conference held in 2002, and presents current research in the field. The book is arranged in a logical, disciplinary fashion, first discussing touch and blindness from a psychological perspective, followed by an examination from the perspective of neuroscience. Some specific topics include: *processing spatial information from touch and movement; *form, projection, and pictures for the blind; *neural substrate and visual and tactile object representations; and *the role of visual cortex in tactile processing. Touch and Blindness is ideal for researchers in psychology and neuroscience, medicine, and special education.

Assistive Technology for Blindness and Low Vision

Assistive Technology for Blindness and Low Vision PDF Author: Roberto Manduchi
Publisher: CRC Press
ISBN: 1439871558
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 424

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Book Description
Assistive technology has made it feasible for individuals with a wide range of impairments to engage in many activities, such as education and employment, in ways not previously possible. The key factor is to create consumer-driven technologies that solve the problems by addressing the needs of persons with visual impairments. Assistive Technology for Blindness and Low Vision explores a broad range of technologies that are improving the lives of these individuals. Presenting the current state of the art, this book emphasizes what can be learned from past successful products, as well as what exciting new solutions the future holds. Written by world-class leaders in their field, the chapters cover the physiological bases of vision loss and the fundamentals of orientation, mobility, and information access for blind and low vision individuals. They discuss technology for multiple applications (mobility, wayfinding, information access, education, work, entertainment), including both established technology and cutting-edge research. The book also examines computer and digital media access and the scientific basis for the theory and practice of sensory substitution. This volume provides a holistic view of the elements to consider when designing assistive technology for persons with visual impairment, keeping in mind the need for a user-driven approach to successfully design products that are easy to use, well priced, and fill a specific need. Written for a broad audience, this book provides a comprehensive overview and in-depth descriptions of current technology for designers, engineers, practitioners, rehabilitation professionals, and all readers interested in the challenges and promises of creating successful assistive technology.

The Construction of Cognitive Maps

The Construction of Cognitive Maps PDF Author: Juval Portugali
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 0585334854
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 365

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Book Description
and processes which are exclusive to humans in their encoding, storing, decoding and retrieving spatial knowledge for various tasks. The authors present and discuss connectionist models of cognitive maps which are based on local representation, versus models which are based on distributed representation, as well as connectionist models concerning language and spatial relations. As is well known, Gibson's (1979) ecological approach suggests a view on cognition which is diametrically different from the classical main stream view: perception (and thus cognition) is direct, immediate and needs no internal information processing, and is thus essentially an external process of interaction between an organism and its external environment. The chapter by Harry Heft introduces J. J. Gibson's ecological approach and its implication to the construction of cognitive maps in general and to the issue of wayfinding in particular. According to Heft, main stream cognitive sciences are essentially Cartesian in nature and have not as yet internalized the implications of Darwin's theory of evolution. Gibson, in his ecological approach, has tried to do exactly this. The author introduces the basic terminology of the ecological approach and relates its various notions, in particular optic flow, nested hierarchy and affordances, to navigation and the way routes and places in the environment are learned.

Things and Places

Things and Places PDF Author: Zenon W. Pylyshyn
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262162458
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 271

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Book Description
The author argues that the process of incrementally constructing perceptual representations, solving the binding problem (determining which properties go together), and, more generally, grounding perceptual representations in experience arise from the nonconceptual capacity to pick out and keep track of a small number of sensory individuals. He proposes a mechanism in early vision that allows us to select a limited number of sensory objects, to reidentify each of them under certain conditions as the same individual seen before, and to keep track of their enduring individuality despite radical changes in their properties--all without the machinery of concepts, identity, and tenses. This mechanism, which he calls FINSTs (for "Fingers of Instantiation"), is responsible for our capacity to individuate and track several independently moving sensory objects--an ability that we exercise every waking minute, and one that can be understood as fundamental to the way we see and understand the world and to our sense of space.

Brain Mechanisms and Spatial Vision

Brain Mechanisms and Spatial Vision PDF Author: D.J. Ingle
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9789024731176
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 486

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Book Description
This volume contains chapters derived from a N. A. T. O. Advanced Study Institute held in June 1983. As the director of this A. S. I. it was my hope that some of the e1ectrophysiologists could express the potentialities of their work for perceptual theory, and that some perceptionists could speculate on the underlying "units" of perception in a way that would engage the imagination of physio logists. The reader will have to be the judge of whether this was achieved, or whether such a psychophysiological inter1ingua is still overly idealistic. It is clear that after the revolution prec~pitated by Hube1 and Weisel in understanding of visual cortical neurons we still have only a foggy idea of the behavioral output of any particular species of cortical detector. It was therefore particularly unfortunate that two persons who have made great strides in correlating interesting facets of cat cortical physio logy with human psychophysics (Max Cynader and Martin Regan of Dalhousie University) were unable to attend this meeting. Never theless, a number of new and challenging ideas regarding both spatial perception and cortical mechanisms are represented in this volume, and it is hoped that the reader will remember not only the individual demonstrations but the critical questions posed by the apposition of the two different collections of experimental facts. David Ingle April 1984 VII TABLE OF CONTENTS PREFACE V D. N. Lee and D. S. Young Visual Timing of Interceptive Action 1 J. J.