Abstract
BackgroundEarly deafness leads to enhanced attention in the visual periphery. Yet, whether this enhancement confers advantages in everyday life remains unknown, as deaf individuals have been shown to be more distracted by irrelevant information in the periphery than their hearing peers. Here, we show that, in a complex attentional task, a performance advantage results for deaf individuals.Methodology/Principal FindingsWe employed the Useful Field of View (UFOV) which requires central target identification concurrent with peripheral target localization in the presence of distractors – a divided, selective attention task. First, the comparison of deaf and hearing adults with or without sign language skills establishes that deafness and not sign language use drives UFOV enhancement. Second, UFOV performance was enhanced in deaf children, but only after 11 years of age.Conclusions/SignificanceThis work demonstrates that, following early auditory deprivation, visual attention resources toward the periphery slowly get augmented to eventually result in a clear behavioral advantage by pre-adolescence on a selective visual attention task.
Highlights
Several studies have demonstrated that early auditory deprivation results in specific, compensatory changes in visual processing
Deaf individuals are more distracted than their hearing peers by irrelevant information occurring in the visual periphery [10,11,12]
It has been argued that auditory deprivation results in deficient visual selective attention, with deaf individuals being unable to differentiate taskrelevant from task-irrelevant information [16]
Summary
Several studies have demonstrated that early auditory deprivation (deafness) results in specific, compensatory changes in visual processing. Brain imaging studies using ERP or fMRI suggest a greater recruitment of attention-related brain networks under peripheral tasks in deaf as compared to hearing individuals [5,6,7,8,9] Whether this enhancement confers advantages when it comes to more complex visual tasks is, as yet, unknown. In accordance with a deficiency hypothesis, deaf children are rated more distractible than their hearing peers by parents and educators, the correlation between these ratings is often low [16] Based on these findings, it has been argued that auditory deprivation results in deficient visual selective attention, with deaf individuals being unable to differentiate taskrelevant from task-irrelevant information [16]. We show that, in a complex attentional task, a performance advantage results for deaf individuals
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