Question: It is kind of obvious that being blind would affect how you move in general, not just your hands, but my question is, does poor vision or like short-sightedness adversely affect basic co-ordination skills? Not so much things that we don't really need, but things like... using a fork, for example.

Good question!!!

There are a number of factors which affect how you do day-to-day activities, like using a fork, and vision is only one of them! The other main ‘sense’ you use is called proprioception, which is basically the perception of where your hands (and other body parts) are in relation to the rest of your body.

When you make a hand movement, your brain uses a combination of your visual and proprioceptive information to plan where your hand is going to go.

So when people have visual disorders (or are blind!) they have other information they can use to plan this movement.

Generally, when you reduce the ‘quality’ of the visual information available, for example a short-sighted person might see things as being blurry, this affects how accurate our hand movements are. Though, in reality often people have learnt to function quite well without perfect vision, so they would be able to use a fork with no problems.

Something which does affect hand movements more is when people have a lazy eye, where your eyes don’t really point in the same direction (it’s called amblyopia). People with this condition have really poor depth perception, so when they go to reach for a cup or something, the brain can’t calculate properly how far away things are, which makes it hard to plan a proper movement!

Again though, people with this condition learn to use other visual cues, and proprioceptive cues to work out where things are. Though, that being said, one of my best friends has a lazy eye, and she knocks things over ALL the time!! 🙂

So, I guess the answer is, in day-to-day life people can function pretty well, even if they have some sort of visual disorder – it’s when you get them to do tasks in the lab which may require more precise eye-hand co-ordination that you may see more of a detriment in motor performance!