Importance of Touch and Vision for People Implanted With Bionic Eyes

A psychology lecturer Dr George Van Doorn and his colleagues have been studying the importance of touch, or how things feel along with how it looks, in visual prosthetics. They believe that the use of two senses may help people who were blind and have subsequently been fitted with bionic eyes, to see. Only vision projected just areas of light and shade. The addition of touch may help the brain to receive and interpret the electrical impulses sent by the bionic eye thus giving shape to the object it is seeing. Normal people always use information from multiple senses and not just that of vision, to understand what they see. So if multiple senses were linked to the impulses of the bionic eye it would make it easier for the patient to perceive since this would add more information sent to the brain.