Haptic perception in people with deafblindness

Abstract

This paper investigates the question whether people with deafblindness have a better haptic perception than people with normal vision and hearing. The motivation for this work is that previous research has indicated that it is typical to compensate for the loss of one sense by developing a superior other sense, but has not investigated whether this also counts for deafblindness. Hereby, it is interesting to focus on haptic perception because haptics are often used in communication for people with deafblindness. To solve this knowledge gap, we tested the performance of seven people with acquired deafblindness and their seven age- and gender- matched controls in an experiment. Haptics was tested using three standardized tests to capture the performance on haptic perception: the two-point discrimination task for spatial tactile acuity, the Von Frey filaments for tactile sensitivity and just noticeable difference weights for haptic force feedback. Results showed that people with deafblindness were better than their matched controls in spatial tactile acuity and tactile sensitivity, but surprisingly not in haptic force feedback. This can implicate that people with deafblindness have lower thresholds for passive touch than people with normal vision and hearing, but in active touch there does not seem to be a difference. Measured body location (arm, hand or finger) appears to influence the result. More research needs to be done to elaborate this result, taking differences in people with deafblindness into concern.