U-VIP: Unit for Visually Impaired people, Center for Human Technologies, Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, Genoa, Italy.
Sci Rep. 2018 Jun 20;8(1):9383. doi: 10.1038/s41598-018-27370-9.
Vision seems to have a pivotal role in developing spatial cognition. A recent approach, based on sensory calibration, has highlighted the role of vision in calibrating hearing in spatial tasks. It was shown that blind individuals have specific impairments during audio spatial bisection tasks. Vision is available only in the frontal space, leading to a "natural" blindness in the back. If vision is important for audio space calibration, then the auditory frontal space should be better represented than the back auditory space. In this study, we investigated this point by comparing frontal and back audio spatial metric representations. We measured precision in the spatial bisection task, for which vision seems to be fundamental to calibrate audition, in twenty-three sighted subjects. Two control tasks, a minimum audible angle and a temporal bisection were employed in order to evaluate auditory precision in the different regions considered. While no differences were observed between frontal and back space in the minimum audible angle (MAA) and temporal bisection task, a significant difference was found in the spatial bisection task, where subjects performed better in the frontal space. Our results are in agreement with the idea that vision is important in developing auditory spatial metric representation in sighted individuals.
视觉似乎在空间认知的发展中起着关键作用。最近的一种基于感觉校准的方法强调了视觉在空间任务中校准听觉的作用。研究表明，盲人在音频空间二分任务中存在特定的障碍。由于视觉仅在额前空间中可用，因此导致了背部的“自然”失明。如果视觉对音频空间校准很重要，那么听觉的额前空间应该比听觉的后空间更好地表示。在这项研究中，我们通过比较额前和后听觉空间度量表示来研究这一点。我们在二十三名视力正常的受试者中测量了在视觉似乎对听觉校准至关重要的二分任务中的精度。为了评估所考虑的不同区域的听觉精度，还进行了最小可听角和时间二分任务这两个对照任务。虽然在最小可听角（MAA）和二分任务中，额前空间和后空间之间没有差异，但在二分任务中存在显著差异，受试者在前额空间中的表现更好。我们的结果与视觉在视觉正常的个体中发展听觉空间度量表示中很重要的观点一致。
