Spatial coordinate systems for tactile spatial attention depend on developmental vision: evidence from event‐related potentials in sighted and congenitally blind adult humans

Abstract

Changes in limb posture (such as crossing the hands) can impair people's performance in tasks such as those involving temporal order judgements, when one tactile stimulus is presented to either hand. This crossed hands deficit has been attributed to a conflict between externally and anatomically anchored reference systems when people localize tactile stimuli. Interestingly, however, the performance of congenitally blind adults does not seem to be affected by crossing the hands, suggesting a default use of an anatomically rather than an externally anchored reference system for tactile localization. In the present study, 12 congenitally blind and 12 sighted adults were instructed to attend to either the left or the right hand on a trial-by-trial basis in order to detect rare deviants (consisting of a double touch) at that hand, while ignoring both deviants at the other hand and frequent standard stimuli (consisting of a single touch) presented to either hand. Only the sighted participants performed less accurately when they crossed their hands. Concurrent electroencephalogram recordings revealed an early contralateral attention positivity, followed by an attention negativity in the sighted group when they adopted the uncrossed hands posture. For the crossed hand posture, only the attention negativity was observed with reduced amplitude in the sighted group. By contrast, the congenitally blind group displayed an event-related potential attention negativity that did not vary when the posture of their hands was changed. These results demonstrate that the default use of an external frame of reference for tactile localization seems to depend on developmental vision.

Spatial and numerical processing in children with high and low visuospatial abilities

“…Finally, because children were required to perform the Simon and numerical comparison tasks with their hands in parallel or crossed over the body midline, our experiment also allowed us to examine whether low visuospatial skills affect the development of an allocentric spatial frame of reference. According to recent studies, the use of this coordinate system develops during early infancy (Bremner, Holmes, & Spence, 2008) and depends on early visual experience (Collignon, Voss, Lassonde, & Lepore, 2009;Röder, Föcker, Hötting, & Spence, 2008;Röder, Rösler, & Spence, 2004;Röder et al, 2007). Indeed, whereas sighted participants presented classic Simon and SNARC effects in crossed and uncrossed hand conditions, early blind individuals showed the classic effects in the uncrossed condition and showed the reversed effects in the crossed condition (Crollen, Dormal, Seron, Lepore, & Collignon, 2013;Röder et al, 2007).…”

Auditory, tactile, and audiotactile information processing following visual deprivation.

“…In the study by Rôder et al (2008), for instance, congenitally blind and sighted controls had to detect deviant tactile stimuli presented to the index finger of the hand that was cued while adopting either an uncrossed or crossed posture. The results revealed that, consistent with the prediction, the early attentional modulation of tactile ERPs (at 96-120 ms) observed in the uncrossed posture disappeared in the crossedhands posture only for the sighted participants (cf Eimer, Cockburn, Smedley, & Driver, 2001).…”

Crossmodal interaction between the mental number line and peripersonal haptic space representation in sighted and blind individuals

“…Previous evidence suggests that blind individuals represent numerical magnitude along the mental number line: They display the SNARC effect when numbers are presented in the auditory modality and also show other classic properties of normal number representation, such as the distance effect (i.e., longer reaction times when discriminating numerically close quantities, as compared with more distant quantities) (Castronovo & Seron, 2007;Szücs & Csépe, 2005). However, it is not known whether the mental number line, when activated, can influence haptic estimation of external space in blind individuals who usually encode space in body-reference coordinates without generating a visuospatial mental representation (Röder et al, 2008;Röder et al, 2007;Röder et al, 2004). effects observed in the number conditions.…”

“…The latter were included in order to investigate whether the possible crossmodal influence of auditorily presented numbers on haptic spatial judgments requires the mediation of a visuospatial mental representation. In fact, there is evidence that crossmodal interactions occur only when sensory information from different modalities is remapped onto an external spatial reference frame, and this may need vision in order to develop (see Collignon, Voss, Lassonde, & Lepore, 2009;Putzar, Goe rendt, Lange, Rösler, & Röder, 2007;Röder, Föcker, Hötting, & Spence, 2008;Röder, Kusmierek, Spence, & Schicke, 2007;Röder, Rösler, & Spence, 2004). Previous evidence suggests that blind individuals represent numerical magnitude along the mental number line: They display the SNARC effect when numbers are presented in the auditory modality and also show other classic properties of normal number representation, such as the distance effect (i.e., longer reaction times when discriminating numerically close quantities, as compared with more distant quantities) (Castronovo & Seron, 2007;Szücs & Csépe, 2005).…”