IMAGERY RATINGS AND RECALL IN CONGENITALLY BLIND SUBJECTS

Imagery ratings, incidental free recall, and intentional free recall of 19 young congenitally blind adults living in an institute for the blind and of 19 normally sighted controls were compared. Words to be rated and recalled belonged to 3 categories: (a) high-imagery words whose referents can be sensorially experienced by the blind, (b) high-imagery words whose referents cannot be experienced by the blind, and (c) low-imagery words. In the control group, both ratings of imagery and recall were affected by the category to which the word belonged. For the blind group the category of the word affected only the ratings of imagery, which still assumed a peculiar form since words in category (b) received extremely low ratings. It is concluded that the blind can evaluate the imagery value of a word, but that their recall is not affected by the level of its imagery value. Therefore, the imagery value really seems to describe the susceptibility of an item to being coded in a specific visuo-imaginal way, which is more available for sighted than for blind people