Drawing by the congenitally blind

Factual Questions
1

Some time ago I read a study the details of which I’m hazy about now, but I think it was about the experience of visual stimuli in dreams of sighted vs blind people.

Three groups were asked to draw representations of their dreams: 1. sighted people, 2. people who lost vision as adults and 3. people who were congenitally blind and so had never had any experience of vision. The sighted people drew both normally and while blind-folded. The blind-folded drawings by the sighted group were virtually unintelligible, whilst the congenitally blind drawings were good.

The question is, how were the people in group 3 able to represent anything at all? Do congenitally blind people convert sound and touch information about objects into a visual form? How then could they know how to represent a three-dimensional object in two dimensions?

A caveat perhaps is that some of the images drawn were typical stylisations, eg the sun as a disc with rays emanating from it, a flying bird in the distance as two connected bumps. Maybe they were recreating two dimensional images they knew from raised-line drawings?

2

This reminds me of Esref Armagan, a congenitally blind man who can not only draw, but do so in perspective. There’s an article and video here, which seems to touch on the how; it’s certainly somewhere to start.

3

you have blind sculptors. a special medium for drawing could work for a blind man, like a clay tablet. the blind doing a “free-hand” drawing, guiding their pen/brush by sight alone without holding the sheet with the other hand is tough but doesn’t sound so impossible.