University of Oslo, P.O. Box 1140 Blindern, 0318 Oslo, Norway.
University of Sydney, Lidcombe, NSW 2141, Australia.
Cognition. 2018 Jan;170:123-129. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2017.09.017. Epub 2017 Oct 6.
To understand the interaction between sensory experiences and cognition, it is critical to investigate the possibility that deprivation in one sensory modality might affect cognition in other modalities. Here we are concerned with the hypothesis that early experience with sound is vital to the development of domain-general sequential processing skills. In line with this hypothesis, a seminal empirical study found that prelingually deaf children had impaired sequence learning in the visual modality. In order to assess the limits of this hypothesis, the current study employed a different visual sequence learning task in an investigation of prelingually deaf children with cochlear implants and normal hearing children. Results showed statistically significant learning in each of the two groups, and no significant difference in the amount of learning between groups. Moreover, there was no association between the age at which the child received their implant (and thus access to electric hearing) and their performance on the sequential learning task. We discuss key differences between our study and the previous study, and argue that the field must reconsider claims about domain-general cognitive impairment resulting from early auditory deprivation.
为了理解感官体验和认知之间的相互作用，研究一种感觉模态的剥夺是否会影响其他感觉模态的认知是至关重要的。在这里，我们关注的是这样一个假设，即早期的声音体验对于发展领域一般性的序列处理技能至关重要。这一假说得到了一项开创性的实证研究的支持，该研究发现，失聪的儿童在视觉模式下的序列学习能力受损。为了评估这一假说的局限性，本研究在对植入人工耳蜗的失聪儿童和听力正常的儿童进行调查时，采用了一种不同的视觉序列学习任务。结果表明，两组儿童在学习方面都有显著的统计学意义，且组间学习量没有显著差异。此外，儿童接受植入物（从而获得电听觉）的年龄与其在序列学习任务中的表现之间没有关联。我们讨论了我们的研究与之前研究之间的关键差异，并认为该领域必须重新考虑因早期听觉剥夺而导致的领域一般性认知障碍的说法。
