A framework to account for the effects of visual loss on human auditory abilities.

Kolarik, Andrew J.; Pardhan, Shahina; Moore, Brian C. J.

doi:10.1037/rev0000279

Cited by 11 publications

(21 citation statements)

References 174 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…This result is in line with the hypothesis that, in the absence of visual calibration, blind subjects have difficulties in performing tasks that require a metric representation of the auditory space (Finocchietti et al, 2015). Both results are consistent with the perceptual deficiency hypothesis and with Principles P1 (complexity) and P6 (calibration requiring visual cues) from the perceptual restructuring hypothesis proposed by Kolarik, Pardhan, and Moore (2021). In summary, the results obtained using verbal reports are not conclusive.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 76%

“…Also, Wanet and Veraart (1985) reported that the early-onset blind group was less accurate than both the late-onset blind and sighted groups to perceive the absolute distance to nearby sources. However, according to Kolarik, Pardhan, and Moore (2021), these last differences would have been nonsignificant had the authors adjusted the significance level for multiple comparisons.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Auditory distance perception by blind and sighted participants for both within- and beyond-reach sources.

Lombera¹,

Etchemendy²,

Spiousas³

et al. 2022

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Perfor

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This study aimed to test the hypothesis that associates blindness with a reduced ability to judge the absolute distance from sound sources. Our working hypotheses were the following: (a) Within reach, a blind subject will be able to make up for the lack of vision using proprioceptive information to calibrate the acoustic distance perception cues. (b) As the source becomes unreachable, blind people will show greater biases since, out of reach, the proposed mechanism for calibration could not be used. To approach these topics, we carried out a series of auditory distance experiments in which we asked sighted and blind participants to report their distance estimates verbally or by reaching the sound source. Within-reach results showed that blind participants performed better than (reaching) or similar to (verbal report) the sighted. The verbal report results showed similar biases between both groups. However, blind participants had more compressive responses than the sighted. Furthermore, blind participants showed more biased responses in the far field than in the peripersonal space, while sighted participants showed similar biases regardless of distance. Our results strongly suggest that the blind can calibrate their distance estimations through the use of proprioceptive spatial information. Public Significance StatementThis study demonstrated that blind participants can calibrate their auditory distance estimations with tactile-proprioceptive spatial information.

show abstract

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 76%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Auditory distance perception by blind and sighted participants for both within- and beyond-reach sources.

Lombera¹,

Etchemendy²,

Spiousas³

et al. 2022

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Perfor

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Blindness can result in large changes in auditory abilities, with impaired auditory abilities in certain tasks, improved abilities in others, and no change in other tasks (for reviews, see Collignon et al ( 2009 ), Voss et al ( 2010 ), Kolarik et al ( 2016a , 2021 ) and Voss ( 2016 )). For example, blind participants have been shown to display marked deficits for tasks involving absolute judgments (Kolarik et al 2017a ), spatial bisection (Gori et al 2014 ), the localization of sounds in elevation (Zwiers et al 2001 ; Lewald 2002 ), and perception of the location of a sound source in relation to external auditory landmarks (Vercillo et al 2018 ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Finally, other studies showed no effect of VI on auditory abilities in tasks requiring distance discrimination (Kolarik et al 2013b ) or indicating the spatial position of a single sound source on a vertical surface (Cappagli et al 2017 ), when compared to sighted controls. Whether an auditory deficit or enhancement occurs appears to be task dependent, and factors that influence whether an auditory ability is enhanced or deteriorates in people with VI remain to be clarified (Kolarik et al 2021 ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Partial visual loss disrupts the relationship between judged room size and sound source distance

et al. 2021

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Visual spatial information plays an important role in calibrating auditory space. Blindness results in deficits in a number of auditory abilities, which have been explained in terms of the hypothesis that visual information is needed to calibrate audition. When judging the size of a novel room when only auditory cues are available, normally sighted participants may use the location of the farthest sound source to infer the nearest possible distance of the far wall. However, for people with partial visual loss (distinct from blindness in that some vision is present), such a strategy may not be reliable if vision is needed to calibrate auditory cues for distance. In the current study, participants were presented with sounds at different distances (ranging from 1.2 to 13.8 m) in a simulated reverberant (T60 = 700 ms) or anechoic room. Farthest distance judgments and room size judgments (volume and area) were obtained from blindfolded participants (18 normally sighted, 38 partially sighted) for speech, music, and noise stimuli. With sighted participants, the judged room volume and farthest sound source distance estimates were positively correlated (p < 0.05) for all conditions. Participants with visual losses showed no significant correlations for any of the conditions tested. A similar pattern of results was observed for the correlations between farthest distance and room floor area estimates. Results demonstrate that partial visual loss disrupts the relationship between judged room size and sound source distance that is shown by sighted participants.

show abstract

“…To verify this assumption, many studies have been conducted to show that visually impaired people have superior auditory sensitivity compared with sighted persons [1]. However, current research has shown that certain auditory abilities are higher in the blind than in sighted controls, such as echo processing and distance discrimination [2,3], while for other abilities such as vertical localization, blindness leads to a deficit [4]. Another related issue is the lack of a systematic and objective methods for the quantification of sensory sensitivity.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Analysis and Validation of Cross-Modal Generative Adversarial Network for Sensory Substitution

Kim

Park

Moon

et al. 2021

IJERPH

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Visual-auditory sensory substitution has demonstrated great potential to help visually impaired and blind groups to recognize objects and to perform basic navigational tasks. However, the high latency between visual information acquisition and auditory transduction may contribute to the lack of the successful adoption of such aid technologies in the blind community; thus far, substitution methods have remained only laboratory-scale research or pilot demonstrations. This high latency for data conversion leads to challenges in perceiving fast-moving objects or rapid environmental changes. To reduce this latency, prior analysis of auditory sensitivity is necessary. However, existing auditory sensitivity analyses are subjective because they were conducted using human behavioral analysis. Therefore, in this study, we propose a cross-modal generative adversarial network-based evaluation method to find an optimal auditory sensitivity to reduce transmission latency in visual-auditory sensory substitution, which is related to the perception of visual information. We further conducted a human-based assessment to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed model-based analysis in human behavioral experiments. We conducted experiments with three participant groups, including sighted users (SU), congenitally blind (CB) and late-blind (LB) individuals. Experimental results from the proposed model showed that the temporal length of the auditory signal for sensory substitution could be reduced by 50%. This result indicates the possibility of improving the performance of the conventional vOICe method by up to two times. We confirmed that our experimental results are consistent with human assessment through behavioral experiments. Analyzing auditory sensitivity with deep learning models has the potential to improve the efficiency of sensory substitution.

show abstract

A framework to account for the effects of visual loss on human auditory abilities.

Cited by 11 publications

References 174 publications

Auditory distance perception by blind and sighted participants for both within- and beyond-reach sources.

Auditory distance perception by blind and sighted participants for both within- and beyond-reach sources.

Partial visual loss disrupts the relationship between judged room size and sound source distance

Analysis and Validation of Cross-Modal Generative Adversarial Network for Sensory Substitution

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About