Lessard N, Paré M, Lepore F, Lassonde M
Département de Psychologie, Université de Montréal, Québec, Canada.
Nature. 1998 Sep 17;395(6699):278-80. doi: 10.1038/26228.
Do blind persons develop capacities of their remaining senses that exceed those of sighted individuals? Besides anecdotal suggestions, two views based on experimental studies have been advanced. The first proposes that blind individuals should be severely impaired, given that vision is essential to develop spatial concepts. The second suggests that compensation occurs through the remaining senses, allowing them to develop an accurate concept of space. Here we investigate how an ecologically critical function, namely three-dimensional spatial mapping, is carried out by early-blind individuals with or without residual vision. Subjects were tested under monaural and binaural listening conditions. We find that early-blind subjects can map the auditory environment with equal or better accuracy than sighted subjects. Furthermore, unlike sighted subjects, they can correctly localize sounds monaurally. Surprisingly, blind individuals with residual peripheral vision localized sounds less precisely than sighted or totally blind subjects, confirming that compensation varies according to the aetiology and extent of blindness. Our results resolve a long-standing controversy in that they provide behavioural evidence that totally blind individuals have better auditory ability than sighted subjects, enabling them to compensate for their loss of vision.
盲人是否会发展出超出有视力者的其他感官能力？除了一些传闻之外，基于实验研究提出了两种观点。第一种观点认为，鉴于视觉对于形成空间概念至关重要，盲人应该会受到严重损害。第二种观点则表明，通过其他剩余的感官会产生补偿作用，使他们能够形成准确的空间概念。在这里，我们研究了一项具有生态重要性的功能，即三维空间映射，是如何由有或没有残余视力的早期盲人个体来完成的。受试者在单耳和双耳聆听条件下接受测试。我们发现，早期盲人受试者能够以与有视力的受试者相同或更高的精度绘制听觉环境地图。此外，与有视力的受试者不同，他们能够单耳正确地定位声音。令人惊讶的是，有残余周边视力的盲人个体定位声音的精确程度低于有视力或完全失明的受试者，这证实了补偿作用会因失明的病因和程度而有所不同。我们的研究结果解决了一个长期存在的争议，因为它们提供了行为证据，表明完全失明的个体比有视力的受试者具有更好的听觉能力，使他们能够弥补视力丧失的缺陷。
