Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Dye, Matthew W G
• Hauser, Peter C
• Bavelier, Daphne
• Baker, Chris I.

Titel

Is visual selective attention in deaf individuals enhanced or deficient? The case of the useful field of view

Ist Teil von

• PloS one, 2009-05, Vol.4 (5), p.e5640-e5640

Ort / Verlag

United States: Public Library of Science

Erscheinungsjahr

2009

Quelle

MEDLINE

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Early 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. We 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. This 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.