Study Suggests Video Games Can Help the Blind Navigate

A recent study from Harvard’s Laboratory for Visual Neuroplasticity at Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary suggests that audio-based video games can help blind individuals to navigate physical spaces.

The study participants, all of whom were legally blind, moved through a virtual representation of The Carroll Center for the Blind in Newton, Mass. using the audio-based environment simulator, a computer-based video game that simulates actual physical spaces with traditional game elements such as monsters and jewels.

After playing the game, participants successfully transferred spatial information acquired in the virtual building to physical navigation tasks in the actual building and produced accurate cognitive maps of the space.

“Once I learned the environment [through the video game] and mapped it out in my mind, I could actually go into the real place, the real building and know where everything was,” said Lindsay A. Yazzolino, who participated in the study before joining the research team.

Different parts of the building, and the game-like elements, are represented by audio-based clues. For example, a knocking sound in the right headphone signifies the presence of a door on the right side. Participants use four keyboard keys and the space bar to navigate through the building.

Yazzolino said that the game is more effective than other methods used to introduce blind individuals to new physical spaces because it encourages active learning, rather than simple memorization.

“It is not just about walking a blind person through a building, it really encourages problem solving skills,” Yazzolino said. “Even now when I think about the building I still have a map in my mind of how the building is laid out.”

She added that individuals who played the video game devised their own routes and shortcuts, while people who learn with instructors on site tend to stick to routes they know.

Erin C. Connors, a student at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education who was one of the co-authors of the paper, said the study looks to show that blind individuals have the same spatial capabilities as people with full visual capacity.

“For a long time it was believed that blind individuals didn’t use the visual cortex,” Connors said. But she referenced the generation of cognitive spatial maps in blind individuals as evidence that even the visual cortex of people who cannot see can undergo rewiring.

Participants who were born blind and those who became blind after birth were able to create such mental maps. This result is especially significant, Connors said, because it shows that neuroplasticity in the visual cortex can occur later in life.

—Staff writer Alyza J. Sebenius can be reached at asebenius@college.harvard.edu. Follow her on Twitter @asebenius.