Out of sight, but still in the mind: Body-specific associations between space and valence in blind people

Abstract

A substantial body of evidence demonstrates that individuals tend to associate positive concepts with their dominant side of space in their mental models. However, prior research indicates that the left-is-good bias among left-handed individuals is stronger than the right-is-good bias observed in right-handed individuals. One potential explanation for this asymmetry is that right-handers, during face-to-face interactions with predominantly right-handed communicators, experience a vicarious form of motor fluency that may contradict their own actions, thereby diminishing their bias toward the right-is-good mapping. However, this hypothesis has yet to be empirically tested. Here, we investigated this assertion by examining the role of visual experience in the scalability of the body-specificity effect among early blind (N = 123; 54.5 % females, mean age = 27.02) and sighted right-handers (N = 127; 54.3 % females, mean age = 28.93). Our results reveal that both Chinese blind and sighted individuals exhibited a body-specificity effect in their mental representations. Notably, the strength of the right-is-good pattern in blind right-handers was more pronounced than that observed in sighted controls. Collectively, our findings not only provide empirical evidence for the body-specificity effect within blind populations but also support the role of vicarious experiences in the development of implicit space-valence associations.