Investigating motor skills of visually impaired young people and the use of sound to guide movements

Vision plays an important role in the development of these skills. The impact of visual impairment on perceptual-motor development is not well understood as a result of mixed findings and limited research.

Therefore, the current thesis investigated this topic using a perception-action framework. <br><br>Four studies were conducted to assess the motor performance of visually impaired (VI) and sighted young people. Studies were designed to be close to the execution of object control and locomotor actions in real-life and to explore the use of auditory-based modifications. Mixed results regarding effects of visual impairments on motor skills and benefits of additional auditory task augmentation were found across the thesis experiments, and a consideration of the organismic, task and environmental constraints unique to each study is needed to make sense of the results. <br><br>The first study showed that degree of visual impairment (organismic constraint) impacted motor performance with the more severely VI group producing lower performance across a variety of motor tasks.