Heled Eyal, Ohayon Maayan
Department of Psychology, Ariel University, Israel.
Department of Neurological Rehabilitation, Sheba Medical Center, Israel.
J Deaf Stud Deaf Educ. 2021 Jun 14;26(3):314-321. doi: 10.1093/deafed/enab005.
Studies examining visuospatial working memory (WM) in individuals with congenital deafness have yielded inconsistent results, and tactile WM has rarely been examined. The current study examined WM span tasks in the two modalities among 20 individuals with congenital deafness and 20 participants with typical hearing. The congenital deafness group had longer forward and backward spans than typical hearing participants in a computerized Corsi block-tapping test (Visuospatial Span), whereas no such difference was found in the Tactual Span (tactile WM). In the congenital deafness group, age of sign language acquisition was not correlated with either condition of the visuospatial task, and Tactual and Visuospatial Spans scores were correlated in the backward but not the forward condition. The typical hearing group showed no correlation between the tasks. The findings suggest that early deafness leads to visuospatial but not tactile superiority in WM, specifically with respect to the storage component. More broadly, it appears that deafness-related compensation mechanisms in WM do not affect the other modalities in a uniform manner.
针对先天性耳聋个体的视觉空间工作记忆（WM）的研究结果并不一致，而触觉工作记忆很少被研究。当前研究在20名先天性耳聋个体和20名听力正常的参与者中，对两种模式下的工作记忆广度任务进行了检测。在计算机化的科西方块敲击测试（视觉空间广度）中，先天性耳聋组的顺向和逆向广度比听力正常的参与者更长，而在触觉广度（触觉工作记忆）测试中未发现此类差异。在先天性耳聋组中，手语习得年龄与视觉空间任务的任何一种情况均无相关性，并且触觉广度和视觉空间广度得分在逆向条件下相关，而在顺向条件下不相关。听力正常组的任务之间未显示出相关性。研究结果表明，早期耳聋会导致工作记忆在视觉空间方面而非触觉方面具有优势，特别是在存储成分方面。更广泛地说，似乎工作记忆中与耳聋相关的补偿机制不会以统一的方式影响其他模式。
