Abstract:

Technologies for enhancing creativity of special-needs children are widely used in modern special education to improve their social integration. However, creativity can also be affected by sensory pathologies, resulting in both deprivational and compensatory phenomena realized as outstanding abilities.

The research questions are as follows:
- Do visual analyzer pathologies influence the creative development of visually impaired children?
- What is the relationship between children's imagination development level and their visual acuity indicators?

The main goal of the study is to investigate vision impairments’ impact on the intermodal transfer of musical images to the visual imagination.
The sample included 60 children aged 10-12 years (30 children with the visual analyzer’s peripheral part pathology, visual acuity of 0.1 - 0. 4; 30 children with visual acuity 1.0).

The respondents were asked to listen to Tchaikovsky’s "The Sick Doll" and graphically reproduce their visual associations. The data was processed with the statistical package for social sciences 3.0. The results were evaluated in qualitative and quantitative parameters for images, their integrity, objectivity, dynamism and composition.

The results indicate that a decrease in visual acuity affect negatively the intermodal transfer process. Visually impaired children demonstrated a poor supply of visualizations, rare original compositions. The average number of their object-associated images was 3.2 compared to 6.7 in the control group. The differences were significant at the level of p<0.01. Most drawings lacked color schemes; they were inadequate to the emotional (minor) tone of music. The differences in imagination characteristics between the two groups were evident due to the lack of correlations between visual acuity indicators and the level of imagination development. This indicates that group differences are found not only owing to the nosological factor, but also the conditions of education. The results can be used to develop art therapy programs for visually impaired children.

Keywords:

Special education, art therapy, visually impaired children.