Temporal Cues Influence Space Estimations in Visually Impaired Individuals

IScience
Monica GoriClaudio Campus

Abstract

Many works have highlighted enhanced auditory processing in blind individuals, suggesting that they compensate for lack of vision with greater sensitivity of the other senses. Few years ago, we demonstrated severely impaired auditory precision in congenitally blind individuals performing an auditory spatial metric task: their thresholds for bisecting three consecutive spatially distributed sounds were seriously compromised, ranging from three times typical thresholds to total randomness. Here, we show that the deficit disappears if blind individuals are presented with coherent temporal and spatial cues. More interestingly, when the audio information is presented in conflict for space and time, sighted individuals are unaffected by the perturbation, whereas blind individuals are strongly attracted by the temporal cue. These results highlight that temporal cues influence space estimations in blind participants, suggesting for the first time that blind individuals use temporal information to infer spatial environmental coordinates.

Citations

Jul 25, 2019·Scientific Reports·Sara FinocchiettiAnderson Souza Oliveira
Aug 28, 2020·Frontiers in Neuroscience·Maria Bianca AmadeoMonica Gori
Aug 28, 2020·Psychological Science·Ceren BattalOlivier Collignon
Jul 28, 2020·Cognition·Chiara ValzolgherFrancesco Pavani
Sep 23, 2021·PloS One·Giorgia BertonatiMonica Gori

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