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This increased somatosensory reliance may increase postural sway when it comes to more challenging postural conditions.

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A short review of the literature on auditory event-related potentials and mismatch negativities (MMN) in cochlear implant users engaged in music-related auditory perception tasks is presented. Behavioral studies that have measured the fundamental aspects of music perception in CI users have found that they usually experience poor perception of melody, pitch, harmony as well as timbre (Limb and Roy, 2014). This is thought to occur not only because of the technological and acoustic limitations of the device, but also because of the biological alterations that usually accompany deafness. In order to improve music perception and appreciation in individuals with cochlear implants, it is essential to better understand how they perceive music. As suggested by recent studies, several different electrophysiological paradigms can be used to reliably and objectively measure normal-hearing individuals' perception of fundamental musical features. These techniques, when used with individuals with cochlear implants, might contribute to determine how their peripheral and central auditory systems analyze musical excerpts. The investigation of these cortical activations can moreover give important information on other aspects related to music appreciation, such as pleasantness and emotional perception. The studies reviewed suggest that cochlear implantation alters most fundamental musical features, including pitch, timbre, melody perception, complex rhythm, and duration (e.g., Koelsch et al., 2004b; Timm et al., 2012, 2014; Zhang et al., 2013a,b; Limb and Roy, 2014). A better understanding of how individuals with cochlear implants perform on these tasks not only makes it possible to compare their performance to that of their normal-hearing peers, but can also lead to better clinical intervention and rehabilitation.

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Auditory input plays an important role in the development of body-related processes. The absence of auditory input in deafness is understood to have a significant, and even irreversible, impact on these processes. The ability to map touch on the body is an important element of body-related processing. In this research, the crossed-arm temporal order judgment (TOJ) task was used to evaluate the spatial mapping of touch. This task elicits a conflict between visual and somatosensory body-related information through a change in posture. We used the crossed-arm TOJ task to evaluate the spatial mapping of touch in deaf participants. Results suggested that a change in posture had a greater impact on congenitally deaf participant TOJ than for hearing participants. This provides the first evidence for the role of early auditory exposure on spatial mapping of touch. More importantly, most deaf participants had auditory prosthetics which provided auditory input. This suggests an important, and possibly irreversible, impact of early auditory deprivation on this body-related process.

Musicians are better at processing sensory information and at integrating multisensory information in detection and discrimination tasks, but whether these enhanced abilities extend to more complex processes is still unknown. Emotional appeal is a crucial part of musical experience, but whether musicians can better identify emotions in music throughout different sensory modalities has yet to be determined. The goal of the present study was to investigate the auditory, tactile and audiotactile identification of emotions in musicians. Melodies expressing happiness, sadness, fear/threat, and peacefulness were played and participants had to rate each excerpt on a 10-point scale for each of the four emotions. Stimuli were presented through headphones and/or a glove with haptic audio exciters. The data suggest that musicians and control are comparable in the identification of the most basic (happiness and sadness) emotions. However, in the most difficult unisensory identification conditions (fear/threat and peacefulness), significant differences emerge between groups, suggesting that musical training enhances the identification of emotions, in both the auditory and tactile domains. These results support the hypothesis that musical training has an impact at all hierarchical levels of sensory and cognitive processing.

A thorough evaluation of the vestibular function, as described in the present study, could not only be helpful to make a more accurate prognosis of the risks of fall following cochlear implantation, but also to provide proper vestibular rehabilitation for at-risk patients.