No abstract

The susceptibility to gaze cueing in deaf children aged 7-14 years old (N = 16) was tested using a nonlinguistic task. Participants performed a peripheral shape-discrimination task, whereas uninformative central gaze cues validly or invalidly cued the location of the target. To assess the role of sign language experience and bilingualism in deaf participants, three groups of age-matched hearing children were recruited: bimodal bilinguals (vocal and sign-language, N = 19), unimodal bilinguals (two vocal languages, N = 17), and monolinguals (N = 14). Although all groups showed a gaze-cueing effect and were faster to respond to validly than invalidly cued targets, this effect was twice as large in deaf participants. This result shows that atypical sensory experience can tune the saliency of a fundamental social cue.We are grateful to all the children who participated in the study. We also thank the hearing and deaf colleagues of the LaCAM laboratory for help in collecting data for the deaf children, and Alice Zanini and Mariaelena Tenan for help in collecting data for the hearing controls. A special thank to Scuola Primaria M. D'Azeglio (Verona), Istituto Comprensivo di Cossato (Biella), Scuola Primaria dell'ISISS Magarotto (Roma), Vedovoci ONLUS, and Ente Nazionale Sordi (Trento). Finally, we thank Benedetta Heimler for preliminary discussions concerning this project. This work was supported by a grant from Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Trento e Rovereto (CARITRO) to Francesco Pavani and Maria C. Caselli. . Electronic mail may be sent to francesco.pavani@unitn.it.

No abstract

Multisensory interactions in deaf cognition are largely unexplored. Unisensory studies suggest that behavioral/neural changes may be more prominent for visual compared to tactile processing in early deaf adults. Here we test whether such an asymmetry results in increased saliency of vision over touch during visuo-tactile interactions. About 23 early deaf and 25 hearing adults performed two consecutive visuo-tactile spatial interference tasks. Participants responded either to the elevation of the tactile target while ignoring a concurrent visual distractor at central or peripheral locations (respond to touch/ignore vision), or they performed the opposite task (respond to vision/ignore touch). Multisensory spatial interference emerged in both tasks for both groups. Crucially, deaf participants showed increased interference compared to hearing adults when they attempted to respond to tactile targets and ignore visual distractors, with enhanced difficulties with ipsilateral visual distractors. Analyses on task-order revealed that in deaf adults, interference of visual distractors on tactile targets was much stronger when this task followed the task in which vision was behaviorally relevant (respond to vision/ignore touch). These novel results suggest that behavioral/neural changes related to early deafness determine enhanced visual dominance during visuo-tactile multisensory conflict.