Change blindness in profoundly deaf individuals and cochlear implant recipients

Finding the balance between capture and control: Oculomotor selection in early deaf adults

“…The authors suggest that under certain conditions, deaf adults might be more deliberate than hearing controls in releasing their responses, a strategy that could ultimately reduce capture by salient task-irrelevant visual information (Sladen et al, 2005). However, Bottari et al (2008) examined search efficiency in a change blindness task for perifoveal as well as for peripheral stimuli in deaf and hearing adults and found comparable responses between the two groups, suggesting that voluntary attention deployment was not affected by early auditory deprivation.…”

“…This research has also mainly tapped into covert-attention mechanisms, mostly presenting stimuli in the center of the visual field (e.g., Dye & Bavelier, 2010;Parasnis, Samar, & Berent, 2003;Sladen, Tharpe, Ashmead, & Grantham, 2005;Stivalet, Moreno, Richard, Barraud, & Raphel, 1998; for results with peripheral visual stimuli see Bottari et al, 2008) or presenting them at both central and peripheral locations (Dye, Hauser, & Bavelier, 2009). For instance, Parasnis et al (2003) tested a group of deaf adults and a group of hearing controls in a vigilance task on central stimuli (test of variable attention, T.O.V.A.).…”

Attentional spread in deaf and hearing participants: Face and object distractor processing under perceptual load

“…We believe that our use of photographs of faces and objects instead of rather meaningless material (Armstrong, Neville, Hillyard, & Mitchell, 2002;Loke & Song, 1991;Neville & Lawson, 1987a, 1987bProksch & Bavelier, 2002;Stevens & Neville, 2006; but see Bottari et al, 2008) may well have resulted in the present pattern. One could speculate whether, for deaf participants, widespread attention is a "default" mode of attention allocation, whereas for hearing participants, this processing mode can be accessed in situations including "interesting" or salient material in the visual periphery.…”

Reduced visual discrimination in cochlear implant users

“…In contrast to what is reported for higher-level visual tasks in deaf individuals, children with cochlear implants perform more poorly on tasks of visual attention compared with normally hearing participants [13,14]. Further, using a change blindness paradigm, Bottari et al [15] found that deaf individuals with a cochlear implant were less sensitive to visual changes compared with deaf participants who did not have a cochlear implant. To date, nothing is known about the development of lower-level visual functions in deaf individuals with a cochlear implant.…”