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Data are presented which indicate that the combined use of hypnosis and sensory substitution for visual input may be beneficial to children with learning problems. Such techniques have been applied to children with the specific learning problem of number reversals. Following an initial session of hypnosis and two weeks of specific teaching procedures, five children in an experimental group had the total number of reversals reduced from an initial 10 to zero. For five children in the control group, without hypnosis or special training, number reversals increased from a total of 8 to a total of 13 over a two-week period. Neurological and psychiatric evaluation indicated that all children in both groups had learning disabilities which could be considered developmental, presumably resulting from a maturational lag of the nervous system.

Publisher Summary This chapter focuses on the scientific and technical research and development aspects of sensory aids. The critical role of hearing in the development of language and the production of speech is well established. If hearing is lost after learning to speak, speech is usually retained, but it is subject to a noticeable reduction in quality. Certain sensory aids to this class of the hearing handicapped can ameliorate or remedy this deterioration. The congenitally hearing-impaired child or one who loses hearing before an age of several years cannot acquire speech autonomously and requires special training, with a predictable lag of 3 to 5 years behind normal children in the use and development of language. The problem is exacerbated by the delay in the early recognition of hearing difficulty in the infant and young child. The loss is not addressed until the child noticeably lags his peers in the understanding and use of language, a measure sometimes put off as late as the early school years. Because in human development, the practical use of language antedates formal education, the delay in diagnosis and therapy can introduce irremedial and uncompensatable losses.

The accompanying paper was written following a three-week training course with the Tactile Vision Substitution System (TVSS) under development at the Department of Visual Sciences, University of the Pacific, San Francisco. The instrumentation has been described elsewhere by Collins and Madey (1974) and perceptual studies and underlying theory by Bach-y-Rita et al. (1969), White et al. (1970), and Bach-y-Rita (1972). The present paper is a personal account that provides insight into a perceptual aspect of sensory substitution studies.

In the previous chapters we have studied the results of investigations of perceptual and intellectual activity. The authors have attempted to shed light on the links between higher mental functions. The experimental analysis of the participation of perception in other mental processes such as thought and memory has largely rested on the results of intra functional investigation, in which the method of prolonged stabilization was used. As was pointed out at the beginning of Chapter 2, this method is a unique test model for studying the reduction of effector components of visual perception, because in it, those elements which, according to the widely held view, are absent in the fully formed functional system, have been artificially excluded. In this chapter we shall turn again to the problem of simulating certain properties of the visual system, bearing in mind the fact that an improvement in the methods of intrafunctional investigation is one of the essential conditions for the future construction of models of interfunctional interactions.

In a study of central sensory mechanisms, the investigation of the capabilities of one sensory system should give a strong indication of the capabilities of the amalgam of central sensory mechanisms. It is apparent that a great deal of sensory convergence occurs, and the highest sensory level appear to ignore modalities in the formation of percepts.

WE describe here a vision substitution system which is being developed as a practical aid for the blind and as a means of studying the processing of afferent information in the central nervous system. The theoretical neurophysiological basis1 and the physical concept of the instrumentation2 have been discussed previously, and results obtained with preliminary models have been briefly reported3. A detailed description of the apparatus will appear elsewhere (manuscript in preparation).