Multisensory Interference in Early Deaf Adults

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.

Electrophysiological Dynamics of Visual-Tactile Temporal Order Perception in Early Deaf Adults

“…The earlier latencies found for ED in the −250 and −100 ms (tactile-leading) SOA conditions implies faster processing of the tactile stimulus by ED when there is reduced influence from a visual stimulus, possibly enhancing the saliency of the tactile cue. A similar finding for visual saliency and faster visual processing was reported in ED performing a spatial task, a domain dominated by the visual modality (Heimler et al, 2017). Follow up studies directly manipulating the reliability of visual and tactile signals are necessary to fully understand how saliency of one modality influences processing of the second modality in a temporal order discrimination task.…”

Sensory loss enhances multisensory integration performance

“…This is further supported by the fact that both congenital and acquired blind individuals exhibit integration patterns linked to a TBW narrowing, namely a low susceptibility to multisensory illusions (Hötting and Röder 2004;Champoux et al 2011;Occelli et al 2012). These findings might, however, not generalize to other types of sensory loss, as deaf individuals show an increased susceptibility to multisensory illusions (Heimler et al 2017;Karns et al 2012). Moreover, the sensory combinations used to investigate MSI abilities differ among the studied populations: in blind individuals, integration of tactile and auditory stimuli has been assessed, in deaf, integration of tactile and visual stimuli, and we investigated the integration of auditory and visual stimuli.…”

Early deafness leads to re-shaping of functional connectivity beyond the auditory cortex

“…The altered functional role of the FPN and enhanced visual–FPN interconnections may constitute the neural basis for the congenitally deaf’s superior performance in both sensory attention (Bavelier et al 2000 ) and visuospatial working memory (Ding et al 2015 ). While deaf subjects consistently outperform hearing subjects in several other visual tasks (Dewey and Hartley 2015 ; Scott et al 2014 ), this occurs almost exclusively under high attentional load (Heimler et al 2017 ). We speculate that enhanced connectivity between the sensory and FPN may provide the neural basis for visual compensation mechanisms, by supporting the higher need for visual attention resources in the deaf.…”