Abstract
It is unresolved whether the permanent auditory deprivation that deaf people experience leads to the enhanced visual processing of faces. The current study explored this question with a matching task in which observers searched for a target face among a concurrent lineup of ten faces. This was compared with a control task in which the same stimuli were presented upside down, to disrupt typical face processing, and an object matching task. A sample of young-adolescent deaf observers performed with higher accuracy than hearing controls across all of these tasks. These results clarify previous findings and provide evidence for a general visual processing advantage in deaf observers rather than a face-specific effect.
Highlights
IntroductionConsidering this advantage was not present for inverted faces[24], but was found for highly similar non-face objects[24,27,28,29], it is not clear whether it reflects a face-specific effect or a more generalized visual cognition advantage for stimuli that display high within-category similarity
This study examined whether a sample of young-adolescent deaf observers exhibit an advantage in face matching over hearing controls
These findings help to clarify the results of previous studies. Whereas these studies emphasize the existence of a face advantage in deaf observers, such an advantage was, more likely to be absent than present across different face tasks[25] and different face conditions[24,25]
Summary
Considering this advantage was not present for inverted faces[24], but was found for highly similar non-face objects[24,27,28,29], it is not clear whether it reflects a face-specific effect or a more generalized visual cognition advantage for stimuli that display high within-category similarity These inconsistent results across studies might reflect the different tasks, but could relate to small sample sizes, low trial numbers per condition, and close-to-ceiling performance in some experiments In contrast to previous studies, we employed a task that measures face encoding directly, by minimizing the contribution of memory demands (for reviews see refs 30 and 31), and that provides considerably more trials and produces average performance that is substantially below ceiling In this task, observers were required to match an image of an unfamiliar target face to a ten-face line-up, in which a different image of the target could be present or absent[32]. This suggests that this is an appropriate task to assess the face recognition ability of deaf and hearing participants
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