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

Heimler, Benedetta; Zoest, Wieske van; Baruffaldi, Francesca; Donk, Mieke; Rinaldi, Pasquale; Caselli, María Cristina; Pavani, Francesco

doi:10.1016/j.bandc.2015.03.001

Cited by 19 publications

(25 citation statements)

References 72 publications

(140 reference statements)

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“…These eye movements thus appeared to be increasingly more goal-driven (see also . This pattern has been replicated numerous times and is also extremely robust across different populations, such as action video-game players and deaf observers (Heimler, Pavani, Donk, & van Zoest, 2014;Heimler et al, 2015).…”

Section: Eye Movement Control Depends On Saccadic Latencymentioning

confidence: 67%

Conditional control in visual selection

Zoest

Stigchel

Donk

2017

Atten Percept Psychophys

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Attention and eye movements provide a window into the selective processing of visual information. Evidence suggests that selection is influenced by various factors and is not always under the strategic control of the observer. The aims of this tutorial review are to give a brief introduction to eye movements and attention and to outline the conditions that help determine control. Evidence suggests that the ability to establish control depends on the complexity of the display as well as the point in time at which selection occurs. Stimulusdriven selection is more probable in simple displays than in complex natural scenes, but it critically depends on the timing of the response: Salience determines selection only when responses are triggered quickly following display presentation, and plays no role in longer-latency responses. The time course of selection is also important for the relationship between attention and eye movements. Specifically, attention and eye movements appear to act independently when oculomotor selection is quick, whereas attentional processes are able to influence oculomotor control when saccades are triggered only later in time. This relationship may also be modulated by whether the eye movement is controlled in a voluntary or an involuntary manner. To conclude, we present evidence that shows that visual control is limited in flexibility and that the mechanisms of selection are constrained by context and time.The outcome of visual selection changes with the situational context, and knowing the constraints of control is necessary to understanding when and how visual selection is truly controlled by the observer.

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Section: Eye Movement Control Depends On Saccadic Latencymentioning

confidence: 67%

Conditional control in visual selection

Zoest

Stigchel

Donk

2017

Atten Percept Psychophys

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“…Hence, in addition to previously reported findings indicating changes in bottom-up attentional aspects, top-down attentional components might be similarly altered [112]. Comparably, top-down visuospatial processes were investigated by assessing eye movements in deaf individuals during an overt saccadic target-selection task, i.e., when searching for a target between stimuli and a distractor target [113]. Interestingly, deaf adults showed slower saccadic responses, which in turn most likely produced a diminished saliency effect.…”

Section: Adaptation To Auditory Deprivationmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Cross-Modal Effects of Sensory Deprivation on Spatial and Temporal Processes in Vision and Audition: A Systematic Review on Behavioral and Neuroimaging Research since 2000

et al. 2019

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One of the most significant effects of neural plasticity manifests in the case of sensory deprivation when cortical areas that were originally specialized for the functions of the deprived sense take over the processing of another modality. Vision and audition represent two important senses needed to navigate through space and time. Therefore, the current systematic review discusses the cross-modal behavioral and neural consequences of deafness and blindness by focusing on spatial and temporal processing abilities, respectively. In addition, movement processing is evaluated as compiling both spatial and temporal information. We examine whether the sense that is not primarily affected changes in its own properties or in the properties of the deprived modality (i.e., temporal processing as the main specialization of audition and spatial processing as the main specialization of vision). References to the metamodal organization, supramodal functioning, and the revised neural recycling theory are made to address global brain organization and plasticity principles. Generally, according to the reviewed studies, behavioral performance is enhanced in those aspects for which both the deprived and the overtaking senses provide adequate processing resources. Furthermore, the behavioral enhancements observed in the overtaking sense (i.e., vision in the case of deafness and audition in the case of blindness) are clearly limited by the processing resources of the overtaking modality. Thus, the brain regions that were previously recruited during the behavioral performance of the deprived sense now support a similar behavioral performance for the overtaking sense. This finding suggests a more input-unspecific and processing principle-based organization of the brain. Finally, we highlight the importance of controlling for and stating factors that might impact neural plasticity and the need for further research into visual temporal processing in deaf subjects.

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“…One question that remains unanswered is whether deafness-related alterations in covert attentional selection are directly related to changes in overt oculomotor performance. Previous research that has looked at oculomotor performance in deaf observers has primarily used explicit oculomotor selection tasks, such as the anti-saccade task (Bottari et al, 2012) or visual search (Heimler, van Zoest, Baruffaldi, Donk, et al, 2015). The aim of this work was to investigate the contribution of spontaneous overt eye movement performance in the presence of social and non-social central cues during a peripheral discrimination task.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This was considered a sign of a modification in the oculomotor control that facilitates reflexive eye movements, and it is consistent with findings in the domain of covert attention showing rapid reorienting behaviour in profound deaf adults (Colmenero et al, 2004; Parasnis, 1992; Parasnis & Samar, 1985). More recently, Heimler and colleagues (2015) examined the time-course of overt selection in profound deaf adults using a modified visual-search task, where target and distractor salience was manipulated to examine how deaf observers balance salience-driven and goal-driven eye movements. In this work, it emerged that deaf participants were better able to avoid salience-driven saccades than their hearing peers, supporting the idea that deafness does not necessarily lead to uncontrolled prioritisation of salient events in the visual field (see also Sladen et al, 2005).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Eye-movement patterns to social and non-social cues in early deaf adults

Bonmassar

Pavani

Renzo

et al. 2021

Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology

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Previous research on covert orienting to the periphery suggested that early profound deaf adults were less susceptible to uninformative gaze cues, though were equally or more affected by non-social arrow cues. The aim of the present work was to investigate whether spontaneous eye movement behaviour helps explain the reduced impact of the social cue in deaf adults. We tracked the gaze of 25 early profound deaf and 25 age-matched hearing observers performing a peripheral discrimination task with uninformative central cues (gaze vs. arrow), stimulus-onset asynchrony (250 vs. 750 ms) and cue-validity (valid vs. invalid) as within-subject factors. In both groups, the cue-effect on RT was comparable for the two cues, although deaf observers responded significantly slower than hearing controls. While deaf and hearing observers eye movement pattern looked similar when the cue was presented in isolation, deaf participants made significantly eye movements than hearing controls once the discrimination target appeared. Notably, further analysis of eye movements in the deaf group revealed that independent of cue-type, cue-validity affected saccade landing position, while latency was not modulated by these factors. Saccade landing position was also strongly related to the magnitude of the validity effect on RT, such that the greater the difference in saccade landing position between invalid and valid trials, the greater the difference in manual RT between invalid and valid trials. This work suggests that the contribution of overt selection in central cueing of attention is more prominent in deaf adults and helps determine the manual performance, irrespective of cue-type.

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

Cited by 19 publications

References 72 publications

Conditional control in visual selection

Conditional control in visual selection

The Cross-Modal Effects of Sensory Deprivation on Spatial and Temporal Processes in Vision and Audition: A Systematic Review on Behavioral and Neuroimaging Research since 2000

Eye-movement patterns to social and non-social cues in early deaf adults

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