Sustained visual attention in deaf and hearing adults

Abstract

Benedetti and Loeb (1972) have established that loss of vision (blindness) can be associated with enhancement in the quality of auditory vigilance. The present study demonstrates that loss of hearing (deafness) can result in an analogous enhancement with regard to visual vigilance. Legally deaf and normal-hearing adults monitored a visual display continuously for 45 min. Critical signals for detection were occasional increments in the horizontal movements of a bar of light. The deaf observers detected significantly more signals with no higher false alarm rates than the normals. The superiority of the deaf is attributed to the transfer of practiced variables related to more efficient utilization of visual information.Sensory factors are of considerable importance in the performance of sustained attention or vigilance tasks. For example, the overall quality of sustained attention is greater when stimulation is in the auditory as compared with the visual mode, and in some cases, acoustic tasks have been more resistant than visual tasks to the temporal decline in performance that typically occurs in vigilance situations (cf. Warm, 1977). In addition, similar variations in task parameters are not necessarily accompanied by parallel changes in auditory and visual performances (Loeb & Binford, 1968) .As a rule, knowledge of sensory factors in vigilance has come from experiments using observers who were free of sensory impairments. However, insight into the role played by sensory factors in mon itoring activities might also be gained by considering the quality of sustained attention in sensory-handicapped individuals. One might wonder if the presence of such a handicap in a given modality (e.g., vision) has any bearing on an individual's ability to sustain att ention to stimulation in a nonimpaired modality (e.g., audition). In addition to its implications for an understanding of sensory factors in vigilance, a quest ion of this sort also has meaning on an organismic level, since individual differ-

Development of Visual Attention Skills in Prelingually Deaf Children Who Use Cochlear Implants

“…Their CPT used visually presented geometrical shapes as stimuli and the task was to detect a certain type of shape based on whether the object had a hole toward its top or bottom. In contrast to the findings of Dittmar et al (1982), Parasnis et al reported deficits in performance of deaf adults compared with normalhearing participants. It is unclear to what degree the geometric stimuli were verbally encoded (for instance, as "top" or "bottom").…”

“…Dittmar, Berch, and Warm (1982) used a CPT that required 45 minutes of visual monitoring of a light-bar that executed a string of paired movements. The task was to respond when the degree of movement differed between the two paired movements.…”

Selection for vigilance assignments: a review and proposed new direction

“…Paradoxically, sensory impairment has been found to be a beneficial factor in vigilance performance. Benedetti and Loeb (1972) have reported that blind observers performed more effectively than sighted observers on an auditory vigilance task and Dittmar et al (1982) found superior performance for deaf as compared to normal hearing observers on a visual vigilance task. The utility of these findings for the selection issue is limited, however, by the availability and acceptance of blind and deaf observers for monitoring assignments in operational environments such as military surveillance, airport security, or medicine.…”

Children's Search for Targets Located within and beyond the Field of View: Effects of Deafness and Age

“…attention in a visual vigilance task (Dittmar et al 1982) and visual processing in search tasks (Stivalet et al 1998). These studies suggest that, because deaf adults cannot use audition as an alerting modality, they have developed more proficiency than hearing adults in scanning the visual field for spatially uncertain events.…”