Relationship of stimulus and examinee variables to performance on analogous visual and tactile block construction tasks.

Nonverbal/spatial tests are unavailable for persons with visual impairments, despite decades of documented need and developmental effort. Because past tactile analogs of block design (BD) tests have not been widely accepted, known BD test parameters were compared across visual and tactile designs to assess the applicability of the test across modalities. Contrary to expectations, edge-cueing of designs with no perceptual cohesiveness (PC) improved tactile and visual performance. The expected PC by cueing and field independence (FI) by PC interactions were found for visual, but not tactile, BD. Uncued tactile designs elicited more errors, tending to occur closer to the center of the designs. These data suggest that visual and tactile BD performance cannot be interpreted similarly. Differences may be due to to modality-specific demand for various encoding and recoding abilities. The standing model is expanded to account for cross-modality differences in BD performance by including both rotation and block segregation.