Why Does Training Reduce Blind Pedestrians ’ Veering ?

Defined with respect to straight-line locomotion, to veer is to deviate from one’s intended straight-line path. In the absence of sources of guidance such as a target to walk toward or a guideline to walk along, veering appears to be nearly unavoidable. This phenomenon has long been a matter of both common and scientific curiosity. Why do sighted people tend to walk in circles when they lack visual guidance? Why do blind people tend to veer when crossing quiet roads? At a Vanderbilt University conference in 1991, I used the veering of blind pedestrians to illustrate the challenges of measuring spatially directed behavior (Guth, 1992). That conference, organized by the late Everett Hill, also linked basic research to progress in the provision of rehabilitation services to people with visual impairments, and several of the authors in this volume also participated in that conference (see Hill, 1992). In this paper, I revisit the veering problem with an emphasis on what has been learned in the intervening years about the source of the problem and about its remediation. For the former, I lean heavily on recent work by Kallie, Schrater, and Legge (in press), and for the latter, I rely on work carried out in collaboration with my colleagues, LaDuke and Gesink.