Blindness is caused by damage and defects of the visual senses, divided into blindness and low vision, making it difficult for children's activities, causing obstacles to physical and mental development, and the appearance of obstacles sooner or later and the degree of impairment on visual impairment are not the same. In general, children with visual impairments have different characteristics from those of bright-eyed children in terms of cognitive, emotional and social adaptation, and academic achievement.
1) Cognitive characteristics
perception.
Blind children and low-vision children due to the lack of vision, so hearing and touch have become the main way for them to perceive objective things. Therefore, the hearing of blind children is very sensitive in development. Blind children can spatially locate through hearing, use sound to judge the direction, and understand and familiarize themselves with the living and learning environment through hearing. Blind children also have a keen sense of touch. Through training, blind children can not only learn six points of braille, but also recognize objects, and the sense of touch can also help blind children form correct concepts and develop thinking. Blind children and children with low vision are worse than bright-eyed children in terms of spatial perception, shape perception, and integration of perception and movement.
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Attention and memory.
In terms of cognitive development, children with visual impairment lag behind bright-eyed children, but their attention spans such as hearing and touching are very good. Due to the lack of visual experience, visual appearances are difficult to form, resulting in young children with visual impairment showing the characteristics of mechanical memory, and the results of re-understanding objects are far lower than those of bright-eyed children. But as we age, this difference will gradually decrease and tend to disappear.
Ability to learn.
Impaired vision or disability necessarily affects an individual's ability to learn, but the degree of impact varies from person to person. On the issue of the learning ability of visually impaired children, the research conclusions of scholars at home and abroad are roughly summarized as follows: visual defects do not obviously affect intelligence, children with visual impairment are not necessarily mentally inferior to bright-eyed children; children with visual impairment often have greater difficulties in conceptual formation; and the academic performance of visually impaired children is usually worse than that of bright-eyed children.
language.
Language acquisition is mainly through hearing rather than vision, so as far as visual impairment itself is concerned, it does not affect the development of children's language. However, there are still weaknesses in the development of language, on the one hand, visually impaired children show abnormalities in secondary aspects such as posture and posture when speaking; on the other hand, children with visual impairment, especially blind children, lack perceptual basis in language expression, lack visual image, and often appear that words and visual images are disconnected from each other, and the connotation of some visual words cannot be accurately grasped.
2) Emotional characteristics and social adaptation
Children with visual impairment are in the dark due to visual impairments, and self-care also requires more effort than blind children to learn. As a result, it is often in a negative emotional state of anxiety and frustration. At the same time, children with visual impairments often appear passive, dependent and helpless because they cannot see the consequences of their actions. Coupled with the inability to effectively imitate and learn through visual information, and the inability to use body language to communicate with others, it greatly affects the development of their normal interpersonal relationships.