Adults born blind that have never seen elephants and sharks have rich insight into what the animals look like, a new Johns Hopkins University study found.
“First-person experience isn’t the only way to develop a rich understanding of the world around us,” says Judy Kim, a doctoral candidate at Johns Hopkins and corresponding author of the study published May 21 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“Essentially, the question is, how do we know what we know?”
While some previous research has shown that blind people do have knowledge of things like light and color, researchers still have little understanding of what blind people know about appearance and how such information is learned. Some studies suggest that people born blind remember verbal facts, like ‘flamingos are pink,’ so the research team wanted to investigate further.