Centre de Recherche en Neuropsychologie et Cognition, Département de psychologie, Université de Montréal, Pavillon Marie-Victorin, CP, succursale Centre-Ville, Montréal, Québec, Canada.
Center of Mind/Brain Sciences of University of Trento, Via Delle Regole, Mattarello, Trentino, Italy.
Chem Senses. 2021 Jan 1;46. doi: 10.1093/chemse/bjaa073.
Although often considered a nondominant sense for spatial perception, chemosensory perception can be used to localize the source of an event and potentially help us navigate through our environment. Would blind people who lack the dominant spatial sense-vision-develop enhanced spatial chemosensation or suffer from the lack of visual calibration on spatial chemosensory perception? To investigate this question, we tested odorant localization abilities across nostrils in blind people compared to sighted controls and if the time of vision loss onset modulates those abilities. We observed that congenitally blind individuals (10 subjects) outperformed sighted (20 subjects) and late-blind subjects (10 subjects) in a birhinal localization task using mixed olfactory-trigeminal stimuli. This advantage in congenitally blind people was selective to olfactory localization but not observed for odorant detection or identification. We, therefore, showed that congenital blindness but not blindness acquired late in life is linked to enhanced localization of chemosensory stimuli across nostrils, most probably of the trigeminal component. In addition to previous studies highlighting enhanced localization abilities in auditory and tactile modalities, our current results extend such enhanced abilities to chemosensory localization.
虽然通常被认为是非主导的空间感知，但化学感觉感知可以用于定位事件的来源，并有可能帮助我们在环境中导航。缺乏主导空间感-视觉的盲人是否会发展出增强的空间化学感觉感知，或者在空间化学感觉感知方面会因为缺乏视觉校准而受到影响？为了研究这个问题，我们测试了盲人（10 名受试者）与视力正常的对照组（20 名受试者）在嗅觉定位能力上的差异，以及失明时间的开始是否会影响这些能力。我们观察到，在使用混合嗅觉-三叉神经刺激的双侧定位任务中，先天性盲人（10 名受试者）比视力正常者（20 名受试者）和晚期盲人（10 名受试者）表现更好。这种先天性盲人的优势是嗅觉定位选择性的，但在嗅觉检测或识别方面则没有观察到。因此，我们表明，先天性失明而不是后天失明与双侧嗅觉刺激的定位能力增强有关，这很可能是三叉神经成分的作用。除了先前的研究强调了听觉和触觉模态中增强的定位能力之外，我们当前的结果将这种增强的能力扩展到了化学感觉定位。
