Department of Psychological Sciences, College of Education, Qatar University, Qatar.
School of Psychology, University of Kent, UK.
Sci Rep. 2017 Jan 24;7:41133. doi: 10.1038/srep41133.
It is unresolved whether the permanent auditory deprivation that deaf people experience leads to the enhanced visual processing of faces. The current study explored this question with a matching task in which observers searched for a target face among a concurrent lineup of ten faces. This was compared with a control task in which the same stimuli were presented upside down, to disrupt typical face processing, and an object matching task. A sample of young-adolescent deaf observers performed with higher accuracy than hearing controls across all of these tasks. These results clarify previous findings and provide evidence for a general visual processing advantage in deaf observers rather than a face-specific effect.
尚未解决的问题是，聋人所经历的永久性听觉剥夺是否会导致他们对面部的视觉处理能力增强。本研究通过匹配任务对此进行了探讨，观察者在同时呈现的十个面孔中寻找目标面孔。该任务与控制任务进行了比较，控制任务中呈现的是上下翻转的相同刺激，以破坏典型的面孔处理方式，以及物体匹配任务。一组青少年聋人观察者在所有这些任务中的表现都比听力对照组更准确。这些结果澄清了先前的发现，并为聋人观察者普遍存在的视觉处理优势而非特定于面孔的效应提供了证据。
