The influence of early visual deprivation on audio-spatial working memory.

Abstract

Objective: This study investigates how spatial working memory skills, and the processing and retrieval of distal auditory spatial information are influenced by visual experience. Method: We developed an experimental paradigm using an acoustic simulation. The performance of congenitally blind and sighted participants (n = 9 per group) was compared when recalling sequences of spatialised auditory items in the same or reverse order of presentation. Two experimental conditions based on stimuli features were tested: non-semantic and semantic. Results: Blind participants had a shorter memory span in the backward than the forward order of presentation. In contrast, sighted participants did not, revealing that blindness affects spatial information processing with greater executive source involvement. Furthermore, we found that blind subjects performed worse overall than the sighted group and that the semantic information significantly improved the performance, regardless of the experimental group and the sequences’ order of presentation. Conclusions: Lack of early visual experience affects the ability to encode the surrounding space. Congenital blindness influences the processing and retrieval of spatial auditory items, suggesting that visual experience plays a pivotal role in calibrating spatial memory abilities using the remaining sensory modalities.

Spatial Memory and Blindness: The Role of Visual Loss on the Exploration and Memorization of Spatialized Sounds

“…The better performance of the sighted group was only ascribed to a better use of the spatial relations among the sounds and not to the simple memorization of their locations. The same pattern of results was confirmed in another work that relied on an acoustic virtual reality system ( Setti et al, 2021a ), where the blind group could easily remember sounds’ locations after a spatial exploration of the virtual environment. In the current study, the task required participants to generate a mental spatial image of the audio spatial structure of the items to be remembered.…”

Altered Regional Homogeneity in Patients With Congenital Blindness: A Resting-State Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Study

“…The superior frontal gyrus (SFG), also known as the marginal gyrus, is located in the superior part of the prefrontal cortex ( 50 ) and is involved in higher cognitive functions such as working memory ( 51 ). The audio-spatial working memory of CB patients is compromised since visual experience supports spatial memory ( 52 ). Significantly reduced ReHo values have been demonstrated in the right dorsolateral part of Brodmann area 8, located at the posterior dorsolateral part of SFG (SFGdl_p), in CB patients ( 53 ).…”

Task‐dependent spatial processing in the visual cortex

“…Finally, the ACOP was more pronounced in blind people compared to sighted individuals, suggesting that this contralateral positive potential is not intrinsically visual in nature (Amadeo, Störmer, et al, 2019). Despite this evidence, other studies reported that visual impairment negatively affects blind individuals in performing more elaborate auditory and tactile spatial tasks (Bertonati et al, 2020;Gori et al, 2014;Setti et al, 2018Setti et al, , 2022. For example, congenitally blind people showed strong deficits in performing an acoustic spatial bisection task, but not a minimal audible angle task (Gori et al, 2014), associated with a reduced occipital response (Amadeo, Störmer, et al, 2019;Campus et al, 2019;Gori et al, 2020a;Tonelli et al, 2020).…”