Heled Eyal, Ohayon Maayan, Oshri Or
Department of Psychology, Ariel University, Israel.
Department of Neurological Rehabilitation, Sheba Medical Center, Israel.
Heliyon. 2022 May 29;8(6):e09558. doi: 10.1016/j.heliyon.2022.e09558. eCollection 2022 Jun.
The sensory compensation hypothesis posits that sensory deficits in one modality can lead to enhanced performance of cognitive tasks relying on another, intact modality. Most studies in this area have explored the visual and auditory senses, with inconsistent findings. Meanwhile, the tactile modality has rarely been examined in this context. The present study compared working memory (WM) abilities in the intact senses of individuals with sensory deprivation. Fourteen participants with blindness and 20 with deafness performed a tactile WM task and a verbal or visuospatial WM tasks, respectively. They were compared to 22 age- and education-matched controls who performed all WM tasks. Results showed participants with blindness outperform the other two groups in the tactile WM task and are better than controls in the auditory task. The deafness group outperformed the controls in the visuospatial but not the tactile task. The forward span was longer than the backward span in all modality types and no group by modality interaction was found. Finally, the effect size of differences between blindness and control groups were significantly higher than those of the deafness and control groups' differences. These findings show that blindness and deafness are associated with WM superiority in the intact modality, although not equally. Therefore, the sensory compensation hypothesis in the context of WM is only partially supported as factors, other than deprivation per se may influence performance.
感觉补偿假说认为，一种感觉模态的缺陷会导致依赖另一种完好感觉模态的认知任务表现增强。该领域的大多数研究都探讨了视觉和听觉，结果并不一致。与此同时，触觉模态在这种情况下很少被研究。本研究比较了感觉剥夺个体完好感觉中的工作记忆（WM）能力。14名失明者和20名失聪者分别进行了触觉WM任务和言语或视觉空间WM任务。他们与22名年龄和教育程度匹配的对照组进行比较，对照组完成所有WM任务。结果显示，失明者在触觉WM任务中的表现优于其他两组，在听觉任务中也优于对照组。失聪组在视觉空间任务中优于对照组，但在触觉任务中并非如此。在所有模态类型中，前向广度均长于后向广度，未发现组间与模态的交互作用。最后，失明组与对照组之间差异的效应大小显著高于失聪组与对照组之间差异的效应大小。这些发现表明，失明和失聪与完好感觉模态中的WM优势有关，尽管程度不同。因此，在WM背景下的感觉补偿假说仅得到部分支持，因为除了剥夺本身之外，其他因素可能会影响表现。
