The haptic test battery: A new instrument to test tactual abilities in blind and visually impaired and sighted children

A new psychological test battery was designed to provide a much-needed comprehensive tool for assessing the perceptual and cognitive abilities of visually handicapped children in using active touch. The test materials consist of raised-line, raised-dot, raised-surface shapes and displays, and familiar and novel 3-D objects. The research used 20 sub-tests, ranging from tactual discrimination, systematic scanning and shape coding to short-term and longer-term memory tasks. The research sample consisted of 119 participants. Fifty-nine were blind and visually impaired schoolchildren, aged from 3 to 16 years (the total visually handicapped population of the region), and 60 sighted school children, matched to them on age, gender and social class, living in the Madrid region (capital and province). The dual aim here is to report the reliability, validity and relation to age and visual status of the sub-tests, and to use the data to refine and shorten the test battery further for more general use.