Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 23
Study on the Acquisition of the Concept
of Spatial Representation by Visually
Impaired People
Silvia Elena Ventorini and Maria Isabel Castreghini de Freitas
Abstract This article aims to present the results and analyses of research whose
main objective was to investigate how visually impaired people are able to learn
and draw as well as what the importance is of acquiring the concept of spatial
representation for reading, interpretation and analysis of tactile cartographic
documents by this segment of the population. The data and analyses presented in
this paper were collected from a Special School and a Children's Rehabilitation
Center. The research concluded that a blind child develops this concept in the same
way as any other child: they acquire the concept of the permanent object, acquire
semantic memory and graphic act, attribute sensory and physical meaning to the
graphic act and show difficulties to draw locations and objects that do not possess
significance in their experience of life.
23.1
Introduction
Probably every teacher of the lower grades at Elementary School has already
observed a pupil in the act of drawing and seen graphic shapes materialize on the
paper similar to those of other children. Through imitation and mediation of adults
or other children, children without visual impairments are encouraged to develop
graphical representations from the earliest age. In their act of drawing, they produce
similar graphic forms on the paper, usually considered “stereotypical”: the sun
represented by a circle with rays emerging or set the house represented by a triangle
on top of a square.
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