Huvudkameran
SOCIAL ORIENTATION IN CHILDREN WITH VISUAL IMPAIRMENTS

Vision plays a crucial role in the establishment of early reciprocal infant-caregiver interactions, and later when the child interacts with peers and other people. For example, in order to keep a conversation going, eye contact between the participants is an important ingredient. Without eye contact the conversation is likely to subside. Thus, moments of eye contact are recognized as important opportunities for social contact between people. However, for a child who is visually impaired the establishment of eye contact with another person is limited. Visually impaired children’s deficits in using eye gaze also leads to difficulties in regulating and maintaining interactions. Thus, children with visual impairments often miss opportunities for social interaction. In this project, both blind children and children with low vision participate. With the use of a small video camera attached to the forehead of the child we investigate head positions and head movements of the children during interaction with a sighted person in social day-to-day situations. The project is focused on developing tools and interventions which can be usable for visually impaired children in their interaction with the sighted world.