Find the Missing Element! Haptic Identification of Incomplete Pictures by Sighted and Visually Impaired Children

This study investigates the haptic identification of incomplete raised-line drawings (i.e., pictures with a missing element) by sighted and early visually impaired children aged 9-10 years. Incomplete pictures have already been used in the visual modality to assess perceptual reasoning in children, but not yet under the haptic modality. We found that success at identifying incomplete raised-line pictures (correct naming of object plus missing feature) concerned 32.65% of children’s responses, suggesting that the task was hard although not entirely impossible. Overall, the visually impaired children outperformed the sighted controls at this task. However, there was a large variation in responses across items, and the superiority of the visually impaired children over their sighted peers was not systematic. We concluded that adapting materials from the Wechsler’ image completion subtest to the haptic modality may be relevant to investigate haptic perceptual reasoning in children with and without