“Deaf people are people of the eye.”
“Deaf people see things differently.”
“Deaf people can see more.”
The experiment on peripheral vision was used as an indicator that Deaf people better utilised their sight compared to non-deaf people. I am still left scratching my head. You know why? My peripheral vision is just rubbish. Rather than denounce the whole idea, I find myself wanted to understand it better.
I find myself pondering about Neil Flemming and the VAK model (later VARK). Flemming identified three types of thinkers: visual, auditory and kinaesthetic. He later added ‘reading’ for people who think in ‘text’. While people can think differently, they also learn different. So the VAK model can influence teaching and learning practice, ie. to operate in the visual, auditory or kinaesthetic domain. You can find a lot of evidence in the English language, such as: I see what you mean, I hear what you are saying, and I get the gist of what you mean. Essentially, they all mean the same thing but expressed in different ways, depending on how one thinks. Depending on which characteristics one exhibits, you can observe if a person is a visual thinker, or not.
Are Deaf people visual thinkers? It would involve someone who can think in pictures or film. Someone who can recall images again in their minds. They can create images of how things will look before they are made. They are the observers, the people who sit in the street-side cafes and watch the world go by, and they catch the smallest details. They can abstract ideas from what is seen. They can interpret reality into something that can be perceived different to invoke a reaction, like impressionism and cubism.
I find it difficult to imagine that all Deaf people are visual thinkers. I remember an exercise I used as a trainer, regular, over a period of 8 years. It was called Kim’s Game. 30 different everyday objects are placed on a table in another room. A group of four people are instructed that they will see around 30 objects on a table and, as a team, remember as many objects as they can. They are not allowed to communicate whilst in the room and objects can only be viewed for 30 seconds. The group would organise themselves to look at different parts of the table and work together to remember as many as they can.
I do not recall that Deaf people were better at this ‘game’ than non-deaf people. In fact their scores are very similar. If Deaf people were truly visual thinkers, they should excel in this test. But they don’t. Why don’t they?
There is another type of thinker that might be an alternative option: the kinaesthetic thinker. It is where a person operates in the feeling domain. The thinker is more tactile, using movement and touch to express their feelings. Kinaesthetic thinkers express through doing, touching, feeling, moving.
When you think of a Deaf person expressing their ideas through their movement, you realise that signed languages are very well equipped to do this. The changes in rhythm, tempo or temperature can change how the same sign is expressed and its meaning. Our signed language poetry has it in abundance. The movements are collected into abstract ideas by the way of signs. Classic examples include classifiers and placements that create rules to bring the real or imagined space into the hands (or topographical space).
I would expect all people to be able to think in the visual, auditory or kinaesthetic modes but one will be adopted more favourably. Here is a simple idea that will help you to decide if you are a visual or kinaesthetic thinker. You are asked to describe a room in your house that you know well. Try to recall the room in as much detail as you can. When you have finished, think about what you have just said and decide whether you described the room as an observer looking at a picture or a film, in the observer position, or were you in the picture or film and moving about in the room referring to the things as they are laid out in front of you?
If you are the observer, then you are operating in the visual mode but if you are in the room, then you are operating in the kinaesthetic mode.
The idea of ‘kinaesthetic people’ reminds me of a previous blog I wrote on ‘sensorimotor’ stages of cognitive development (Piaget). The act of moving, sensing, feeling, emoting the space they are in. The movement can be real (moving in space) or abstracted (signing in topographical space). This coincides with ideas that signed languages are less iconic than we think, the sign for bird may look iconic to us as signed language users but they are not iconic to non-signed language users. Therefore, signed languages are an abstracted representation of what is real.
I am left thinking about a piece of poetry by Dot Miles. She used her hands to describe a tree by a lake in the sun; one hand to represent the tree and another to represent the reflection of the tree on the lake. But then she moved, her eyes switched from the observer of her creation to actually being there, looking at the tree and admiring the reflection in the rising sun. It was a classic Miles moment when she is there, feeling, emoting and living in her creations. She wasn’t creating pictures for you to see, she was creating worlds for you to sit in and feel, right in the palm of her hands.
Photo by Max Sparber
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LinkedInTags: Flemming, imagined, Kim's game, kinaesthetic, Miles, Piaget, real, sensorimotor, signed language, Stokoe, topographical space, VAK model, visual
I have to say my peripheral vision is excellent, and the findings of research confirmed what I already knew. It frustrated me silly when Deaf Awareness stuff out of the 90s used to insist you didn’t have better vision. My reaction, I just wanted to scream.
Kim’s Game, I have down as a short term memory test rather than visual enhancement. The game doesn’t require you to notice detail, but rather an overview of objects and to recall these.
I think there’s a two pronged thing happening. There is better vision and noticing things. For example, I rely on shadows a lot, to let me know if there is other people around. A car has just pulled up in the driveway, I know it is here although I didn’t hear it. The lighting in the ceiling changed to a subtle shade of blue (the light has bounced off the car). If I tell hearing people this, they generally look at me blankly, and start looking at the ceiling baffled.
Another example, I notice subtle reflections of light changes in the paint of doors, that gives me all the information I need to know someone is in another room.
Etc…
If someone had a good use of their visual capacities, then in Kim’s game, they would just take a mental photo. No need to rely on a heavily active memory because the visual abilities would do the work.
Interestingly, one piece of research states that the way Deaf people organise numbers in order and contra-order is the same in either direction. This differs from auditory thinkers who are primarily linear (ie. one way). But this is true for both kinaesthetic and visual thinkers: one imagines a picture with numbers in the air and the other moves through the numbers in space.
I’d be interested in knowing HOW the people in Kim’s game tried to memorize the objects. Did they take a visual picture? Did they list off the items? Did they use a mnemonic device? I don’t think just finding out who won the game would be an indicator of who is a better visual learner.
Good questions. The exercise is won when the group of four reaches an accurate number, it wasn’t so much about winning individually but as a group. But the individual scores were recorded. Once the groups had viewed the items for 30 seconds, they wrote their own list and then discussed as a group. It didn’t matter if the accurate names were recorded, descriptions were ok too in English or signed language. No aids for memory were provided or allowed, they had to use whatever skills they had.
The strategies to use their memory depended on the person, some were better than others. Sometimes hearing people had a better visual memory and sometimes Deaf people did. There was no real trend that Deaf people had an upper hand.
Like Alison, my peripheral vision is good. I pick up things deaf people sign, when they think I am not looking.
Also, where I live, I go for walks on the road, being no foot paths in a rural area, and I am oblivious to the traffic until a car slows down/ pulls up along side of me.
And again like Alison, I do notice subtle light, shadows etc…I think part of it is to do with letting go of my audio sense [I don't wear my hearing aids unless am conversing with hearing people] and so my vision becomes stronger…
Sign language is not longer a series of shapes to me… the more literate I become, the more attuned to the nuances I become..
There is an enormous amount of informaton in peripheral vision, that goes unnoticed…
Alternatively, I find myself with an acute ability to read another person’s body language and able to interpret their behaviours well; sometimes before they even open their mouth. I can look at people talking in a cafe and understand the relationships between them. Facial expressions are such a strong part of my early communication that it impacts how I relate to people today. In fact, all Deaf people have a strong relationship between how one feels with how one expresses themselves on their faces. If a signed language user is fluent, they will have a heightened use of facial expressions, use of space, showing the nature of movement through space, we find commonalities in shapes we see and replicate them in our hands by way of classifiers. We have a strong emotional relationship with the spaces we create. We respond better when the signing uses space well, we are emotionally connected to it because we can feel it too.
I feel that we might be backing the wrong horse simply because ‘seeing’ is the alternative to ‘hearing’, and we need to explore all options, such as feeling, before we jump to conclusions.
Can I give my thanks to everyone who has contributed. The comments have been very useful. I have raised the issue with other people over the course of the day. It made me think that I need to present this topic differently to how it has been written here. There are three points that I feel are born out of this topic:
1. The increased visual awareness.
2. The sensorimotor influence on signed languages.
3. The distinction between visual memory and visual awareness.
I don’t think it was helpful to present the subject as an ‘either/or’ proposition but I do think that sensorimotor and kinaesthetic dimensions are worth exploring.
Thanks again.