Institute of Brain and Psychological Sciences, Sichuan Normal University, Chengdu, 610066, Sichuan Province, China.
Department of Psychology, University of Nevada, Reno, NV, 89557-0296, USA.
Sci Rep. 2021 Feb 23;11(1):4395. doi: 10.1038/s41598-021-83960-0.
Previous research on early deafness has primarily focused on the behavioral and neural changes in the intact visual and tactile modalities. However, how early deafness changes the interplay of these two modalities is not well understood. In the current study, we investigated the effect of auditory deprivation on visuo-tactile interaction by measuring the cross-modal motion aftereffect. Consistent with previous findings, motion aftereffect transferred between vision and touch in a bidirectional manner in hearing participants. However, for deaf participants, the cross-modal transfer occurred only in the tactile-to-visual direction but not in the visual-to-tactile direction. This unidirectional cross-modal motion aftereffect found in the deaf participants could not be explained by unisensory motion aftereffect or discrimination threshold. The results suggest a reduced visual influence on tactile motion perception in early deaf individuals.
先前有关早期失聪的研究主要集中在完整的视觉和触觉模式中的行为和神经变化上。然而,早期失聪如何改变这两种模式的相互作用还不是很清楚。在本研究中,我们通过测量跨模态运动后效来研究听觉剥夺对视触相互作用的影响。与先前的发现一致,在听力参与者中,运动后效在视觉和触觉之间以双向方式转移。然而,对于失聪参与者,跨模态转移仅发生在触觉到视觉的方向,而不是视觉到触觉的方向。在失聪参与者中发现的这种单向跨模态运动后效不能用单感觉运动后效或辨别阈值来解释。结果表明,早期失聪者的视觉对触觉运动感知的影响降低。