This study is concerned with the expression and recognition of basic emotions in blind and sighted people. We collected audiovisual recordings from blind and sighted people who were asked to produce specific utterances in such a way that they would fit different emotional contexts (i.e., angry, happy, sad, scared). In a perception experiment, 75 sighted participants had to guess which emotion f...

Blind people are known to have superior perceptual abilities in their remaining senses. Several studies suggest that these enhancements are dependent on the specific experience of blind individuals, who use those remaining senses more than sighted subjects. In line with this view, sighted subjects, when trained, are able to significantly progress in relatively simple tactile tasks. However, the...

Although vision offers distinctive information to space representation, individuals who lack vision since birth often show perceptual and representational skills comparable to those found in sighted individuals. However, congenitally blind individuals may result in impaired spatial analysis, when engaging in 'visual' spatial features (e.g., perspective or angle representation) or complex spatia...

Talitha Harris-Brown, Janet Richmond, Sebastian Della Maddalena, and Alinta Jaworski Visual impairment affects approximately 1.8 million people in Australia (Resnikoff et al., 2004) and is defined as a visual acuity or equivalent field loss of less than 6/18 (20/60) by the International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems (World Health Organization, 2010). A varie...

Pedestrian behavior and safety at roundabouts are not well understood, particularly for pedestrians with sensory or mobility impairments. A previous study in which participants indicated when they would cross suggested that blind pedestrians miss more crossing opportunities and make riskier judgments than sighted pedestrians. The present study replicated these findings and analyzed actual stree...

Blind people use auditory information to locate sound sources and sound-reflecting objects (echolocation). Sound source localization benefits from the hearing system's ability to suppress distracting sound reflections, whereas echolocation would benefit from "unsuppressing" these reflections. To clarify how these potentially conflicting aspects of spatial hearing interact in blind versus sighte...