How Blind Individuals Recall Mathematical Expressions in Auditory, Tactile, and Auditory-Tactile Modalities

Abstract

In contrast to sighted students who acquire mathematical expressions (MEs) from their visual sources, blind students must keep MEs in their memory using the Tactile or Auditory Modality. In this work, we rigorously investigate the ability to temporarily retain MEs by blind individuals when they use different input modalities: Auditory, Tactile, and Auditory–Tactile. In the experiments with 16 blind participants, we meticulously measured the users’ capacity for memory retention utilizing ME recall. Based on a robust methodology, our results indicate that the distribution of the recall errors regarding their types (Deletions, Substitutions, Insertions) and math element categories (Structural, Numerical, Identifiers, Operators) are the same across the tested modalities. Deletions are the favored recall error, while operator elements are the hardest to forget. Our findings show a threshold to the cognitive overload of the short-term memory in terms of type and number of elements in an ME, where the recall rapidly decreases. The increase in the number of errors is affected by the increase in complexity; however, it is significantly higher in the Auditory modality than in the other two. Therefore, segmenting a math expression into smaller parts will benefit the ability of the blind reader to retain it in memory while studying.