Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

Auditory Spatial Tuning in Late-onset Blindness in Humans

Auditory Spatial Tuning in Late-onset Blindness in Humans Blind individuals who lost their sight as older children or adults were compared with normally sighted controls in their ability to focus auditory spatial attention and to localize sounds in a noisy acoustic environment. Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded while participants attended to sounds presented in free field from either central or peripheral arrays of speakers with the task of detecting infrequent targets at the attended location. When attending to the central array of speakers, the two groups detected targets equally well, and their spatial tuning curves for both ERPs and target detections were highly similar. By contrast, late blind participants were significantly more accurate than sighted participants at localizing sounds in the periphery. For both groups, the early N1 amplitude to peripheral standard stimuli displayed no significant spatial tuning. In contrast, the amplitude of the later P3 elicited by targets/deviants displayed a more sharply tuned spatial gradient during peripheral attention in the late blind than in the sighted group. These findings were compared with those of a previous study of congenitally blind individuals in the same task Röder, B., Teder-Sälejärvi, W., Sterr, A., Rösler, F., Hillyard, S. A., & Neville, H. J. Improved auditory spatial tuning in blind humans. Nature, 400 , 162–166, 1999. It was concluded that both late blind and congenitally blind individuals demonstrate an enhanced capability for focusing auditory attention in the periphery, but they do so via different mechanisms: whereas congenitally blind persons demonstrate a more sharply tuned early attentional filtering, manifested in the N1, late blind individuals show superiority in a later stage of target discrimination and recognition, indexed by the P3. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience MIT Press

Auditory Spatial Tuning in Late-onset Blindness in Humans

Download PDF
9 pages

Loading next page...
 
/lp/mit-press/auditory-spatial-tuning-in-late-onset-blindness-in-humans-1eP23DmqJX

References

References for this paper are not available at this time. We will be adding them shortly, thank you for your patience.

Publisher
MIT Press
Copyright
© 2006 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
ISSN
0898-929X
eISSN
1530-8898
DOI
10.1162/jocn.2006.18.2.149
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

Blind individuals who lost their sight as older children or adults were compared with normally sighted controls in their ability to focus auditory spatial attention and to localize sounds in a noisy acoustic environment. Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded while participants attended to sounds presented in free field from either central or peripheral arrays of speakers with the task of detecting infrequent targets at the attended location. When attending to the central array of speakers, the two groups detected targets equally well, and their spatial tuning curves for both ERPs and target detections were highly similar. By contrast, late blind participants were significantly more accurate than sighted participants at localizing sounds in the periphery. For both groups, the early N1 amplitude to peripheral standard stimuli displayed no significant spatial tuning. In contrast, the amplitude of the later P3 elicited by targets/deviants displayed a more sharply tuned spatial gradient during peripheral attention in the late blind than in the sighted group. These findings were compared with those of a previous study of congenitally blind individuals in the same task Röder, B., Teder-Sälejärvi, W., Sterr, A., Rösler, F., Hillyard, S. A., & Neville, H. J. Improved auditory spatial tuning in blind humans. Nature, 400 , 162–166, 1999. It was concluded that both late blind and congenitally blind individuals demonstrate an enhanced capability for focusing auditory attention in the periphery, but they do so via different mechanisms: whereas congenitally blind persons demonstrate a more sharply tuned early attentional filtering, manifested in the N1, late blind individuals show superiority in a later stage of target discrimination and recognition, indexed by the P3.

Journal

Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience – MIT Press

Published: Feb 1, 2006

There are no references for this article.