Temporal Auditory Acuity in Blind and Sighted Subjects: A Signal Detection Analysis

Abstract

Temporal auditory sensitivity was compared in five adventitiously blind and five normally sighted subjects in a signal-detection paradigm. Following determination of individual auditory flutter fusion (AFF) thresholds the subjects were required to make forced-choice responses between a fluttering and fused white noise under stimulus probabilities of 0.25, 0.50, and 0.75. From these data indices of sensory sensitivity (d') and response bias (Beta) were computed and compared. Analysis indicated no significant differences in auditory sensitivity between the two groups. These findings further weaken the traditional hypothesis of sensory compensation.

Blind Braille readers mislocate tactile stimuli

“…This is despite the fact that identical methods for threshold determination were used in both experiments. The existing literature on tactile thresholds is equally contradictive (Weinstein, 1968;Heinrich and Moorhouse, 1969;Liddle, 1969;Lindblom and Lindströ m, 1976;Warren, 1978;Bernard, 1979;Niemeyer and Starling, 1981;Bross and Borenstein, 1982;Hollins, 1989;Muchnik et al, 1991;Stevens et al, 1996), and we, therefore, conclude that neither visual deprivation nor Braille reading or the combination of both conditions is coupled with a substantial decrease of tactile perception thresholds.…”

Reinforcer Control and Human Signal‐detection Performance

“…This study also has important implications for the use of signal detection in applied settings and in experimental psychology generally. There is a trend towards the use of detection analysis to examine performance on a variety of tasks in which discriminability and response bias are regarded as important dependent variables (e.g., Bross & Borenstein, 1982;Jansen, de Gier, & Slangen, 1985;Koek & Slangen, 1984;Mongrain & Standing, 1989;Wesnes & Warburton, 1983). The present study suggests that some caution is needed when biases are compared.…”

Processing of auditory information by the blind in spatial localization tasks

“…In some cases, superior auditory abilities-better speech discrimination (Niemeyer & Starlinger, 1981) or more accurate spatial localization by means of auditory cues (Kellogg, 1962)-were reported for the blinds. Interpretation of these results has made use of the suggestion of some kind of sensory compensation (Hayes, 1934), even though this traditional hypothesis has been questioned (Bross & Borenstein, 1982;Cronin, McLaren & Campbell, 1983). Nevertheless, in other cases, delays in the development of sound-source reaching behavior has been observed with blind infants (Bower, 1977), which illustrates the major role played by vision in coordinating spatial information coming from nonvisual sensory channels (Lockman, Rieser, & Pick, 1981).…”