Professor John Ravenscroft

Event details

Lecture title: "The Representation(s) of Childhood Visual Impairment"

Venue: LG34, Paterson's Land, Holyrood Campus, The University of Edinburgh

17:15 - Lecture start

18:15 - Q&A

18:30 - Drinks Reception. - A small drinks reception will follow the lecture in the Informatics Forum Atrium. All guest are welcome to attend.

Lecture abstract

William Molyneux in 1688 wrote to John Locke and questioned whether a man born blind and having a globe and a cube of the same bigness, committed into his hand, and being taught or told, which is called the globe and which the cube, so as easily to distinguish them by touch or feeling; then both things taken from him, and laid on a table. Let us suppose his sight restored to him; whether he could, by his sight, and before he touch them, know which is the globe and which the cube? So whether he could not reach them though they were removed 20 or 1000 feet from him? (Letter from William Molyneux to John Locke, 7th July 1688. From the correspondence of John Locke, The John Locke Collection, Bodlean Library, Oxford University.)

This early account of visual impairment and of how people with no vision perceive the world raises many questions about the nature of mental representation and I aim to address some of these questions within this lecture. It is interesting however, that Molyneux was clearly describing a person with ocular ‘eye’ impairment, but yet when we start to examine the data around childhood visual impairment in the economic developed world we find that cerebral visual impairment (CVI) due to ‘damage to visual brain’ and not ‘damage to the eyes’ is the primary cause of childhood visual impairment.

Given that visual acuity, (how clear we see) – is no longer a sufficient marker for visual impairment, how does CVI affect our own representations of how children with visual impairment see, and more importantly how do children with CVI perceive and experience their world and their own learning environment with what is to them, normal vision.