Do people born blind have 3D good spatio-temporal intuition?
I come from Machine Learning with a neuroscience-y question. Basically, some models that we train to interact with an environment often benefit from a good amount of "Newtonian" and causal priors. Very often, these priors are embedded in the visual system of the Machine Learning model, as priors over local displacements, or as visual contingency awareness. Doing so in the visual domain is often much easier than in an abstract domain.
This made me wonder if we have clues as to whether our brains really require vision in order to learn such things or if we have a "signal-type-agnostic" learning mechanism that just learns about intuitive physics.
This led me to wonder if blind people lack some spatio-temporal intuition that non-blind people have, or if vision is a required ingredient for some class of physical reasoning tasks.
Thanks!
Posted Nov 9, 2018, 4:38 PM UTC
I'm not sure if I totally understand your question, but I'll take a stab. There is good reason to believe that at least some (and probably many) aspects of our understanding of physics are innate.
We have to embed such information in our models because either it's not innate (as it would be in most humans), or they can't acquire it on their own. Even folks who are blind from birth are interacting with the world in a variety of ways. A lot of what babies do (for example, picking up and dropping items over and over again) probably scaffold their naive intuitions about physics. So even people who can't see for example, get a LOT of input that would help them develop a mature intuitive understanding of physics.
This might not be exactly what you're looking for, but see Barbara Landau's seminal paper, comparing sighted & blind toddlers' navigation. Basically showing that even blind toddlers understand the basics of geometry/navigation (Landau, Gelman & Spelke, 1981)
See also the research of this awesome psychologist, Dr. Ella Striem-Amit. She studies people who can interact with the world differently (e.g., blind; no hands), and looks to see whether brain structures actually preserve these abilities they lack (e.g., are there brain structures supporting sight or touch). Interestingly, she finds that in a lot of cases, the brain structures are preserved, even when a person has been blind throughout their entire life! Hope this is a little useful!
Thanks! This is exactly the kind of literature I was looking for!
The term in psychology is called "intuitive physics". Here (<- pdf!) is a good recent review article.
I am not aware of any studies that looked at intuitive physics in blind individuals, mostly because such studies typically involve the presentation and interpretation of visual stimuli (e.g. predicting the results of collisions). There is some active debate about the extent to which some of this is innate vs. learned / inferred from perceptual experience.