There is substantial evidence that sensory deprivation leads to important cross-modal brain reorganization that is paralleled by enhanced perceptual abilities. However, it remains unclear how widespread these enhancements are, and whether they are intercorrelated or arise at the expense of other perceptual abilities. One specific area where such a trade-off might arise is that of spatial hearing, where blind individuals have been shown to possess superior monaural localization abilities in the horizontal plane, but inferior localization abilities in the vertical plane. While both of these tasks likely involve the use of monaural cues due to the absence of any relevant binaural signal, there is currently no proper explanation for this discrepancy, nor has any study investigated both sets of abilities in the same sample of blind individuals. Here, we assess whether the enhancements observed in the horizontal plane are related to the deficits observed in the vertical plane by testing sound localization in both planes in groups of blind and sighted persons. Our results show that the blind individuals who displayed the highest accuracy at localizing sounds monaurally in the horizontal plane are also the ones who exhibited the greater deficit when localizing in the vertical plane. These findings appear to argue against the idea of generalized perceptual enhancements in the early blind, and instead suggest the possibility of a trade-off in the localization proficiency between the two auditory spatial planes, such that learning to use monaural cues for the horizontal plane comes at the expense of using those cues to localize in the vertical plane.

The main function of pain is to automatically draw attention towards sources of potential injury. However, pain sometimes needs to be inhibited in order to address or pursue more relevant tasks. Elucidating the factors that influence how people manage this relationship between pain and task performance is essential to understanding the disruptive nature of pain and its variability between individuals. Here, 41 healthy adults completed a challenging working memory task (2-back task) while receiving painful thermal stimulations. Examining the trial-by-trial relationship between pain perception and task performance revealed that pain’s disruptive effects on performance were mediated by self-reported pain intensity, and that the analgesic effects of a competing task were influenced by task performance. We found that higher pain catastrophizing, higher trait anxiety, and lower trait mindfulness were associated with larger trade-offs between pain perception and task performance, suggesting that these psychological factors can predict increased fluctuations between disruption by pain and analgesia from a competing task. Altogether these findings provide an important and novel perspective on our understanding of individual differences in the interplay between pain and ongoing task performance.

Numerous recent reports have suggested that individuals deprived of vision are able to develop heightened auditory spatial abilities. However, most such studies have compared the blind to blindfolded sighted individuals, a procedure that might introduce a strong performance bias. Indeed, while blind individuals have had their whole lives to adapt to this condition, sighted individuals might be put at a severe disadvantage when having to localize sounds without visual input. To address this unknown, we compared the sound localization ability of eight sighted individuals with and without a blindfold in a hemi-anechoic chamber. Sound stimuli were broadband noise delivered via two speaker arrays: a horizontal array with 25 loudspeakers (ranging from −90° to +90°; 7.5°) and a vertical array with 16 loudspeakers (ranging from −45° to +67.5°). A factorial design was used, where we compared two vision conditions (blindfold vs. non-blindfold), two sound planes (horizontal vs. vertical) and two pointing methods (hand vs. head). Results show that all three factors significantly interact with one another with regards to the average absolute deviation error. Although blindfolding significantly affected all conditions, it did more so for head-pointing in the horizontal plane. Moreover, blindfolding was found to increase the tendency to undershoot more eccentric spatial positions for head-pointing, but not hand-pointing. Overall, these findings suggest that while proprioceptive cues appear to be sufficient for accurate hand pointing in the absence of visual feedback, head pointing relies more heavily on visual cues in order to provide a precise response. It also strongly argues against the use of head pointing methodologies with blindfolded sighted individuals, particularly in the horizontal plane, as it likely introduces a bias when comparing them to blind individuals.