General Enhancement of Spatial Hearing in Congenitally Blind People

Abstract

Vision is thought to support the development of spatial abilities in the other senses. If this is true, how does spatial hearing develop in people lacking visual experience? We comprehensively addressed this question by investigating auditory-localization abilities in 17 congenitally blind and 17 sighted individuals using a psychophysical minimum-audible-angle task that lacked sensorimotor confounds. Participants were asked to compare the relative position of two sound sources located in central and peripheral, horizontal and vertical, or frontal and rear spaces. We observed unequivocal enhancement of spatial-hearing abilities in congenitally blind people, irrespective of the field of space that was assessed. Our results conclusively demonstrate that visual experience is not a prerequisite for developing optimal spatial-hearing abilities and that, in striking contrast, the lack of vision leads to a general enhancement of auditory-spatial skills.

Social cognition in the blind brain: A coordinate‐based meta‐analysis

“…Interestingly, we did not find evidence for any cross‐modal consistent recruitment of the occipital cortex by social tasks in this meta‐analysis. Cross‐modal plasticity typically refers to activation of the occipital cortex of the early blind in response to input acquired in other sensory modalities, like hearing and touch (for reviews, Merabet & Pascual‐Leone, 2010; Singh, Phillips, Merabet, & Sinha, 2018; Voss, 2019), and may account (at least in part) for the superior perceptual abilities of blind subjects in the spared sensory modalities (e.g., Battal, Occelli, Bertonati, Falagiarda, & Collignon, 2020; Bauer et al, 2015). Alternatively, recruitment of the occipital cortex in the blind has been proposed to also subserve high‐level (cognitive) processing (e.g., Amedi, Raz, Pianka, Malach, & Zohary, 2003; Bedny, Pascual‐Leone, Dodell‐Feder, Fedorenko, & Saxe, 2011; Lane, Kanjlia, Omaki, & Bedny, 2015) suggesting that cortical circuits that are thought to have evolved for visual perception may come to participate in abstract and symbolic higher‐cognitive functions (see Bedny, 2017).…”

Performing Simulated Basic Life Support without Seeing: Blind vs. Blindfolded People

“…In fact, in our study, they outperformed in CC rates, both as a mean rate and as a percentage of CC, which were delivered at the recommended target rate. These results may be related to increased hearing perception and rhythm abilities, as well as paying more attention to the instructor feedback [26,27]. BP were also better than BFP at performing a quick AED discharge, a fact that could be explained by their prior abilities to pay attention and follow verbal and acoustic commands [28].…”

Structural and functional network-level reorganization in the coding of auditory motion directions and sound source locations in the absence of vision

“…To create an externalized ecological sensation of sound location and motion (Møller et al ., 1996), we relied on individual in-ear stereo recordings that were recorded in a semi-anechoic room and from 30 loudspeakers on horizontal and vertical planes, mounted on two semicircular wooden structures with a radius of 1.1m (see Fig 1A) (Battal et al ., 2020). Binaural in-ear recordings allow binaural properties such as interaural time and intensity differences, as well as participant-specific monaural filtering cues, and serve to create reliable and ecological auditory space (Pavani et al ., 2002).…”