Mechanisms of visuospatial orienting in deafness

Finding the balance between capture and control: Oculomotor selection in early deaf adults

“…For instance, it has been repeatedly shown that deaf adults are faster in responding to abrupt visual events compared to hearing controls (e.g., Bottari, Nava, Ley, & Pavani, 2010;Loke & Song, 1991). Deaf adults have also been reported to be faster than hearing controls in reorienting visual attention to the peripheral portion of the visual field in response to abrupt onsets of static (Chen, Zhang, & Zhou, 2006;Colmenero, Catena, Fuentes, & Ramos, 2004; but see Parasnis & Samar, 1985 for similar results with central visual stimuli) as well as of moving visual events (Bosworth & Dobkins, 2002). Furthermore, an electroencephalography (EEG) study (Bottari, Caclin, Giard, & Pavani, 2011) documented that the faster detection of visual stimuli in the deaf population positively correlate with the amplitude of the P1, an early component of visual processing peaking around 100-130 ms post-stimulus.…”

“…The paradigm we adopted also allowed to assess whether deaf participants were quicker than hearing controls at disengaging attention from the distractor when the eyes were first incorrectly directed to the distractor singleton (see for instance Chen et al (2006) and Colmenero et al (2004) for results on covert attention mechanisms suggesting faster re-direction of peripheral visual attention in deaf adults compared to hearing controls). To this aim we conducted a mixed, repeated-measures ANOVA on the fixation-duration of the first saccades ending on the distractor, when the second saccade was correctly directed to the target, with saliency condition (colored-target; colored-distractor; no-colored singleton) as within factor and group as between factor (hearing; deaf).…”

Phonological and orthographic coding in deaf skilled readers

“…Several studies have found faster responses for deaf than hearing participants on other visual tasks, such as perceptual thresholds tasks (Nava, Bottari, Zampini, & Pavani, 2008) or simple detection and lateralization tasks (Colmenero, Catena, Fuentes, & Ramos, 2004;Lore & Song, 1991;Reynolds, 1993). In a review by Pavani and Bottari (2012) on the last years of research on visual abilities in deaf people, they concluded that deaf people do not have better visual skills compared to hearing, but they are faster in tasks with visual stimuli.…”

Inhibition of return: Twenty years after

“…Thus, patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder have been observed to show reduced IOR (Nelson, Early, & Haller, 1993;Rankins, Bradshaw, Moss, & Georgiou-Karistianis, 2004), with perhaps this mechanism explaining their difficulties in disengaging from actions, whereas deaf subjects can disengage their attention faster than can hearing subjects, as indexed by a faster decay of IOR (Colmenero, Catena, Fuentes, & Ramos, 2004). Regarding attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, it is not clear whether these subjects have really an impairment in the attentional mechanism subserving IOR, as they only show a slightly smaller IOR effect than do controls (Li, Chang, & Lin, 2003).…”