The Role of Visual Experience in Auditory Space Perception around the Legs

Elena Aggius-Vella,Claudio Campus,Andrew Joseph Kolarik,Monica Gori

doi:10.1038/s41598-019-47410-2

Abstract

It is widely accepted that vision plays a key role in the development of spatial skills of the other senses. Recent works have shown that blindness is often associated with auditory spatial deficits. The majority of previous studies have focused on understanding the representation of the upper frontal body space where vision and actions have a central role in mapping the space, however less research has investigated the back space and the space around the legs. Here we investigate space perception around the legs and the role of previous visual experience, by studying sighted and blind participants in an audio localization task (front-back discrimination). Participants judged if a sound was delivered in their frontal or back space. The results showed that blindfolded sighted participants were more accurate than blind participants in the frontal space. However, both groups were similarly accurate when auditory information was delivered in the back space. Blind individuals performed the task with similar accuracy for sounds delivered in the frontal and back space, while sighted people performed better in the frontal space. These results suggest that visual experience influences auditory spatial representations around the legs. Moreover, these results suggest that hearing and vision play different roles in different spaces.

Highlights

How we develop a spatial representation of the environment is a topic that has been widely studied over the last decades[1,2,3,4]
Fewer studies have compared auditory spatial perception in frontal and back space[17,40], results have shown that blind and sighted people are accurate in localizing sound in the frontal space, while in the back and median space, blind people outperform sighted[31,41,42]
We investigated the role of prior visual experience on audio spatial perception around the lower body

Summary

Introduction

How we develop a spatial representation of the environment is a topic that has been widely studied over the last decades[1,2,3,4]. Www.nature.com/scientificreports hand, other works have shown that some spatial skills are impaired in the absence of visual input, as shown in early-blind humans such as the localization of the end point of a dynamic sound[11], the building of an audio metric spatial representation[4], the evaluation of absolute distance[30], the auditory spatial representations of the extrapersonal space with different sounds[35], and the vertical localization of a sound source[36] These studies have concentrated their efforts in frontal space, where vision likely plays a principal role in calibrating hearing[37,38,39]. These two spaces, can be well calibrated by sensorimotor feedback[47]

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Results

Conclusion