ABSTRACT
In general, individuals perceive the environmental layout in body-scaled terms. Visually handicapped individuals are faced with perceiving affordances for locomotion without the aid of vision, and research has shown that in many cases touch can be substituted for vision in this respect. Blind individuals can perceive affordances of the environment by using a hand-held object as an extension of the arm. Understanding the perception of affordances by remote haptic perception has implications for theories of perception as well as for the design of hand-held perceptual aids for the visually impaired. When the gap were explored with an object that was weighted on the lower branch, fewer gaps were perceived as crossable relative to when the gap was equally weighted.
