Department of Psychology, University of California, San Diego, 9500 Gilman Dr., La Jolla, CA 92093-0109, USA.
Psychol Sci. 2012 Jul 1;23(7):816-23. doi: 10.1177/0956797611435130. Epub 2012 Jun 8.
Recent evidence suggests that, compared with hearing people, deaf people have enhanced visual attention to simple stimuli viewed in the parafovea and periphery. Although a large part of reading involves processing the fixated words in foveal vision, readers also utilize information in parafoveal vision to preprocess upcoming words and decide where to look next. In the study reported here, we investigated whether auditory deprivation affects low-level visual processing during reading by comparing the perceptual span of deaf signers who were skilled and less-skilled readers with the perceptual span of skilled hearing readers. Compared with hearing readers, the two groups of deaf readers had a larger perceptual span than would be expected given their reading ability. These results provide the first evidence that deaf readers' enhanced attentional allocation to the parafovea is used during complex cognitive tasks, such as reading.
最近的证据表明，与听力正常的人相比，聋人在注视点以外和周边区域观看简单刺激时，视觉注意力更强。虽然阅读的很大一部分涉及到在中央凹视觉中处理注视的单词，但读者也利用周边视觉中的信息来预处理即将到来的单词，并决定下一步看哪里。在本研究中，我们通过比较熟练和不熟练的手语聋人读者与熟练的听力读者的感知广度，来研究听觉剥夺是否会影响阅读过程中的低水平视觉处理。与听力读者相比，两组聋人读者的感知广度都大于根据其阅读能力所预期的广度。这些结果首次提供了证据，表明聋人读者对周边区域的注意力增强分配在阅读等复杂认知任务中得到了利用。
