Unit for Visually Impaired People, Center for Human Technologies, Fondazione Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, Genoa, Italy.
Centro regionale per l'ipovisione in età evolutiva, IRCCS Scientific Institute "E. Medea", Bosisio Parini, Lecco, Italy.
PLoS One. 2019 Apr 18;14(4):e0212006. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0212006. eCollection 2019.
Blind individuals are particularly dependent on their hearing for defining space. It has been found that both children and adults with visual impairments can struggle with complex spatial tasks that require a metric representation of space. Nonetheless the variability of methods employed to assess spatial abilities in absence of vision is wide, especially in the case of visually impaired children. For this reason, it would be necessary to define a battery of tests that appropriately assess different aspects of spatial perception and to investigate its reliability in order to provide a standard assessment of spatial abilities not only in experimental but also in clinical settings. The aim of this study is to determine the test-retest reliability of a battery of six spatial tasks (BSP, Blind Spatial Perception) and provide the first gold standard for assessing spatial cognition deficits in visually impaired children. Thirty visually impaired children aged 6-17 participated in two identical sessions, at a distance of 10 weeks, in which they performed six spatial tasks: auditory bisection, auditory localization, auditory distance discrimination, auditory reaching, proprioceptive reaching, and general mobility. Test-retest reliability was assessed using the test-retest scatter plots, intra-class correlation coefficient (ICC), and coefficient of variation (CV). The results showed good-to-excellent reliability for all six tests, with average ICC values ranging from 0.77 to 0.89 and average CV values ranging from 3.44% to 15.27%. In conclusion, the newly proposed battery (BSP) results as a reliable tool to identify spatial impairments in visually impaired children.
盲人特别依赖听觉来确定空间。已经发现，视力受损的儿童和成人在需要对空间进行度量表示的复杂空间任务中可能会遇到困难。尽管如此，用于评估视力缺失者空间能力的方法的可变性很大，尤其是在视力受损的儿童中。因此，有必要定义一系列测试来适当评估空间感知的不同方面，并研究其可靠性，以便不仅在实验中，而且在临床环境中提供空间能力的标准评估。本研究的目的是确定一套六项空间任务（BSP，盲视空间感知）的测试-重测信度，并为评估视障儿童的空间认知缺陷提供第一个黄金标准。30 名年龄在 6-17 岁的视障儿童参加了两次完全相同的测试，两次测试之间间隔 10 周，在测试中他们完成了六项空间任务：听觉二分法、听觉定位、听觉距离辨别、听觉伸手、本体感受伸手和一般活动能力。使用测试-重测散点图、组内相关系数（ICC）和变异系数（CV）评估测试-重测信度。结果表明，所有六项测试的可靠性均较好，平均 ICC 值范围为 0.77 至 0.89，平均 CV 值范围为 3.44%至 15.27%。总之，新提出的测试套件（BSP）是一种可靠的工具，可以识别视障儿童的空间障碍。
