Joe Alampi CHS Statistics – Period 9

Walk the Line

Analyzing a Person’s Walk When Robbed of Their Sense of Vision

The senses that humans possess allow them to be able assess their environment and make
decisions accordingly. Most of these decisions are instinctive, as we have been developing them since
birth. When someone who has relied on their sense of vision their entire life is robbed of this vision, you
would think that they would react somehow. This is what I tried to analyze with this experiment.
When humans have all their senses, they can walk an almost perfect straight line. However, when
one or several of these senses are restricted or reduced, this straight line is less straight. It is the reason
that walking a straight line is a go-to test for many police officers testing for DUI’s.1 To test this idea, a
sample of high school students at Cardinal Wuerl North Catholic High School were blindfolded and told
to walk normally and comfortably in a straight line. I set up a lane three and a half feet wide and marked
one foot increments to easily measure the distances. I allowed the participant to line themselves up in the
middle of the lane before they were blindfolded. Once the participant touched the edge of the lane we
stopped them and measured their distance from the increment. The data below shows how the participants
did on an average of two runs.

Participant Result
1 362 inches
2 487 inches
3 482.75 inches
4 563 inches
5 145.5 inches
6 293 inches
7 819.5 inches
8 385.75 inches
9 230 inches
10 270 inches

Mean 403.85 inches

Standard Deviation 194.5033276 inches
Critical Values (tc) 2.262157158 inches
Margin of Error (E) 139.1392983 inches
Confidence Interval (264.7017,542.9893)
Equations*
tc = InvT(.975,9)
tc
E= 𝑛
√
C – Interval = (sample mean – E, sample mean + E)
We can see that the data clearly shows that there is a correlation between sight deprivation and disability
to walk in a straight line. We can be 95% confident that a participant would walk between 264.7017 and
542.9893 inches. Another aspect that could be tested in the future is the sense of sound. This ability to
hear could have skewed the results. It was a quiet hallway that was being used in the testing but there are
still faint sounds that could allow the participant to adjust themselves accordingly. Also, if we could be
100% certain of the straightness of the lane, that could have improved the experiment. All in all, this
experiment was very successful in testing how vision affects dexterity while walking.
1 https://www.nysdwi.com/dui-foundation/drunkdriving/testing/fieldsobriety/walkandturn.php
*All other values were found in the “1-Var Stats” function on the TI-84 Calculator