Occelli Valeria, Lacey Simon, Stephens Careese, Merabet Lotfi B, Sathian K
Department of Neurology, Emory University School of Medicine, Atlanta, GA, 30322, USA.
Rehabilitation R&D Center for Visual and Neurocognitive Rehabilitation, Atlanta VAMC, Decatur, GA, USA.
Exp Brain Res. 2017 Jun;235(6):1709-1718. doi: 10.1007/s00221-017-4931-6. Epub 2017 Mar 9.
Numerous studies have found that congenitally blind individuals have better verbal memory than their normally sighted counterparts. However, it is not known whether this reflects superiority of verbal or memory abilities. In order to distinguish between these possibilities, we tested congenitally blind participants and normally sighted control participants, matched for age and education, on a range of verbal and spatial tasks. Congenitally blind participants were significantly better than sighted controls on all the verbal tasks but the groups did not differ significantly on the spatial tasks. Thus, the congenitally blind appear to have superior verbal, but not spatial, abilities. This may reflect greater reliance on verbal information and the involvement of visual cortex in language processing in the congenitally blind.
众多研究发现，先天性失明者的言语记忆比视力正常的人更好。然而，尚不清楚这是否反映了言语能力或记忆能力的优越性。为了区分这些可能性，我们对年龄和教育程度相匹配的先天性失明参与者和视力正常的对照参与者进行了一系列言语和空间任务测试。在所有言语任务中，先天性失明参与者的表现显著优于视力正常的对照组，但在空间任务上两组没有显著差异。因此，先天性失明者似乎具有优越的言语能力，而非空间能力。这可能反映出他们对言语信息的更大依赖，以及先天性失明者视觉皮层在语言处理中的参与。
