Are there relationships among different spatial skills of individuals with blindness? Eleni Koustriava 1 , Konstantinos Papadopoulos * Department of Educational and Social Policy, University of Macedonia, 156 Egnatia Str., P.O. Box 1591, 54006 Thessaloniki, Greece 1. Introduction Individuals with visual impairments have to develop a series of spatial skills so that they can move and be oriented in a spatial environment. Body knowledge, laterality, directionality, mental rotation, perspective-taking and spatial coding are considered to be essential spatial skills. In the present study we include body knowledge in the spectrum of spatial skills because body knowledge is considered to be a fundamental component of environmental knowledge (Cratty & Sams, 1968; Dryhurst, Spencer, & Baybutt, 1985; Morsley, Spencer, & Baybutt, 1991; Spencer, Morsley, Ungar, Pike, & Blades, 1992). Congenital vision loss appears to affect significantly the acquisition of body knowledge (Cratty & Sams, 1968; Spencer, Blades, & Morsley, 1989) and directionality (Cratty & Sams, 1968; Warren, 1994). Cratty and Sams (1968) examined the knowledge of body planes, body parts, body movements, laterality and directionality in 91 children with visual impairments aged 5–16 years old. They found that children’s difficulties in body parts knowledge and directionality may insist even after the age of 12 years old. They concluded that laterality develops around the age of 9 and directionality can be confusing even for adolescents with visual impairments. However, they suggested that with the systematic and appropriate training 7-years-old children with visual impairments could perform laterality tasks effectively and directionality tasks at the age of 8. Previous studies have, also, revealed the detrimental effect of vision loss and visual experience concluding that the vision – even if it is reduced – is important for the acquisition of perspective-taking (Koustriava & Papadopoulos, 2010), mental Research in Developmental Disabilities 33 (2012) 2164–2176 A R T I C L E I N F O Article history: Received 30 March 2012 Received in revised form 12 June 2012 Accepted 12 June 2012 Available online 10 July 2012 Keywords: Visual impairments Body knowledge Directionality Perspective-taking Spatial coding Spatial knowledge A B S T R A C T The aim of this study was to detect the possible relationships between various spatial skills of individuals with blindness. Twenty-eight individuals with blindness participated in five experiments that examined the body knowledge, laterality, directionality, perspective- taking, spatial coding of the near space and spatial knowledge of the far space. According to the results a positive correlation between body knowledge and directionality has emerged. Moreover, body knowledge and spatial coding of near space are found to be predictors of perspective-taking, while directionality and perspective-taking are found to be predictors of spatial coding of near space, and directionality and perspective-taking predictors of spatial knowledge of far space. This finding suggest that future studies should seriously take into account the possibility that the development of a certain skill could in fact be the result of the development of another skill/s. Moreover, the findings support the notion that a delay in the development of a spatial skill may not necessarily be a result of the visual impairment itself but of the incomplete development of another spatial skill. ß 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. * Corresponding author. Tel.: +30 2310 891403; fax: +30 2310 891388. E-mail addresses: elkous@uom.gr (E. Koustriava), kpapado@uom.gr (K. Papadopoulos). 1 Tel.: +30 2310 891403. Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect Research in Developmental Disabilities 0891-4222/$ – see front matter ß 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ridd.2012.06.009