Abstract
The specific role of early visual deprivation on spatial hearing is still unclear, mainly due to the difficulty of comparing similar spatial skills at different ages and to the difficulty in recruiting young blind children from birth. In this study, the effects of early visual deprivation on the development of auditory spatial localization have been assessed in a group of seven 3–5 years old children with congenital blindness (n = 2; light perception or no perception of light) or low vision (n = 5; visual acuity range 1.1–1.7 LogMAR), with the main aim to understand if visual experience is fundamental to the development of specific spatial skills. Our study led to three main findings: firstly, totally blind children performed overall more poorly compared sighted and low vision children in all the spatial tasks performed; secondly, low vision children performed equally or better than sighted children in the same auditory spatial tasks; thirdly, higher residual levels of visual acuity are positively correlated with better spatial performance in the dynamic condition of the auditory localization task indicating that the more residual vision the better spatial performance. These results suggest that early visual experience has an important role in the development of spatial cognition, even when the visual input during the critical period of visual calibration is partially degraded like in the case of low vision children. Overall these results shed light on the importance of early assessment of spatial impairments in visually impaired children and early intervention to prevent the risk of isolation and social exclusion.
Highlights
The effects of early sensory deprivation on the acquisition of perceptual and cognitive skills have been extensively studied in order to measure the weight that each sensory modality has on the development of those skills (Bruner, 1959; Freedman, 1971; Mistretta and Bradley, 1978; Grubb and Thompson, 2004)
To date there have been no previous studies on spatial hearing in young visually impaired children that directly assessed the role of residual vision on the development of auditory localization in static and dynamic conditions
The present experiment aimed at assessing the effects of total versus partial early visual deprivation on the development of auditory spatial localization abilities in childhood
Summary
The effects of early sensory deprivation on the acquisition of perceptual and cognitive skills have been extensively studied in order to measure the weight that each sensory modality has on the development of those skills (Bruner, 1959; Freedman, 1971; Mistretta and Bradley, 1978; Grubb and Thompson, 2004). While the impact of early sensory loss on specific perceptual skills is usually easier to detect in adulthood when sensory systems have been already developed, the shortterm as well as the long-term consequences of impaired perceptual functions in childhood are more difficult to predict This is mainly due to the difficulty of comparing similar spatial skills at different ages and to the difficulty of assessing the spatial performance of congenitally and totally blind children at an early age. The comparison between the effects of total blindness versus degraded vision on spatial perception at an early age provides experimental evidence concerning the essential role of visual experience in shaping space perception and cognition For this reason, in our study we explicitly compared the performance of totally blind and low vision children in different spatial tasks and evaluated how the residual vision correlates with the spatial performance
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