Neural Rehabilitation Engineering Laboratory, Université catholique de Louvain, Avenue Hippocrate 54, UCL-54.46, B-1200 Brussels, Belgium.
Neuropsychologia. 2009 Dec;47(14):3079-83. doi: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2009.07.004. Epub 2009 Jul 16.
Previous studies showed that early blind humans develop superior abilities in the use of their remaining senses, hypothetically due to a functional reorganization of the deprived visual brain areas. While auditory and tactile functions have been investigated for long, little is known about the effects of early visual deprivation on olfactory processing. However, blind humans make an extensive use of olfactory information in their daily life. Here we investigated olfactory discrimination and identification abilities in early blind subjects and age-matched sighted controls. Three levels of cuing were used in the identification task, i.e., free-identification (no cue), categorization (semantic cues) and multiple choice (semantic and phonological cues). Early blind subjects significantly outperformed the controls in odour discrimination, free-identification and categorization. In addition, the larger group difference was observed in the free-identification as compared to the categorization and the multiple choice conditions. This indicated that a better access to the semantic information from odour perception accounted for part of the improved olfactory performances in odour identification in the blind. We concluded that early blind subjects have both improved perceptual abilities and a better access to the information stored in semantic memory than sighted subjects.
先前的研究表明，早期失明的人在使用剩余感官方面发展出了卓越的能力，这假设是由于剥夺视觉的大脑区域的功能重组。虽然听觉和触觉功能已经被长期研究，但关于早期视觉剥夺对嗅觉处理的影响知之甚少。然而，盲人在日常生活中广泛利用嗅觉信息。在这里，我们调查了早期失明受试者和年龄匹配的视力正常对照者的嗅觉辨别和识别能力。在识别任务中使用了三个级别的提示，即自由识别（无提示）、分类（语义提示）和多项选择（语义和语音提示）。早期失明受试者在气味辨别、自由识别和分类方面明显优于对照组。此外，与分类和多项选择条件相比，在自由识别中观察到更大的组间差异。这表明，盲人从嗅觉感知中更好地获取语义信息，部分解释了他们在嗅觉识别中改善的嗅觉表现。我们得出结论，早期失明受试者在感知能力和对语义记忆中存储信息的获取方面均优于视力正常受试者。
