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Abstract:
Abstract: There have been several studies investigating
changes to visual function following early auditory deprivation;
however, psychophysical assessments have failed to validate the
anecdotal suggestions of improved performance on purely
psychophysical tasks. A few studies have shown an advantage for
congenitally deaf subjects in detection tasks that require visual
attention to the peripheral field. In this study we tested the
hypothesis that auditory deprivation from birth alters the gradient
of visual attention from central to peripheral field by enhancing
peripheral processing. We adapted a paradigm by Lavie & Cox
(Psychological Sciences, 1997) for testing the influence of
attentional load in the display on distractor processing. Subjects
were to report the presence of a target item while ignoring a
distractor either in the center or periphery. The distractor's
influence was varied by attentional load of the display. Spare
resources in the lower load conditions spill over to process the
irrelevant distractor. The expanded peripheral attentional
resources available to the deaf individuals are revealed by greater
processing of the distractor under higher attentional loads. This
effect was stronger with peripheral distractors than with central
distractors. We conclude that auditory deprivation from birth leads
to compensatory changes within the visual system that enhance
attentional processing of the peripheral visual field.
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