Abstract
Vision seems essential for cross-modal calibration of auditory cues in spatial perception. Previous findings showed that, in some specific tasks such as sound localization, blind individuals have enhanced skills, suggesting that the audiomotor loop might partially compensate for early visual loss in the calibration of auditory space; however, direct evidence is still lacking. Here, we proposed a method based on the alteration of the audiomotor loop. Acoustic virtual reality was used to measure the audiomotor loop's influence on the space perception of blind individuals. We developed a VR steering task by head or trunk pointing to auditory sources, where the audiomotor conflict is induced by letting trunk rotations change the auditory scene together with head rotations. Early blind, late blind, and sighted participants were tested to assess their sensitivity to the induced audiomotor conflict. The platform demonstrated its effectiveness in exposing participants' sensitivity to the audiomotor loop alteration. The early blind group was significantly more affected than the sighted group, while the late blind group did not significantly differ from any of the other groups. Our results confirm the increased role of the audiomotor loop for audiospatial information processing in blindness and advocate for the development of new spatial orientation training for blind people based on exploiting the audiomotor loop itself.
Highlights
Scientific results suggest that spatial cognition is acquired during development [1]
If early blind people were more affected by the audiomotor loop alteration, they would show larger mean absolute error (MAE) values than late blind and sighted people with altered audiomotor loop, while they would not show any significant difference with preserved audiomotor loop
This view is in line with previous findings that link modified audio-spatial information processing in late blindness and modifications in brain activity [12] and structure [13], mainly associated with the amount of time passed from blindness onset
Summary
Scientific results suggest that spatial cognition is acquired during development [1]. In the context of auditory space perception, the importance of vision for the calibration of audio-spatial cues is well known [2]. Early and late blind showed from sightedlike to enhanced skills in azimuthal sound localization and orientation [3], suggesting the existence of a compensatory process for audio-spatial calibration in absence of vision. It was proposed that the audiomotor loop, that is, the association between movement and consequent change of auditory scene, may drive the compensatory calibration in early blind people [4]. If that were the case, early blind people would use the audiomotor loop to encode audio-spatial information. Understanding the sensorimotor processes visually deprived people undergo to calibrate their auditory space is paramount for developing mobility and orientation training suited for their condition [5]
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