Editorial: The Sensation-Cognition Interface: Impact of Early Sensory Experiences on Cognition

[摘要] The fourteen articles in this special topic are linked by their consideration of how various kinds of experiential deprivation can affect cognitive development. Reflecting recent increased interest in multisensory processing, most submissions look at how the absence of one sensory modality influences processing in another. Codina et al. studied perceptual changes in the peripheral visual field induced by deafness and/or sign language. They compared performance in the central and peripheral vision of deaf signers, hearing signers and hearing non-signers in a forced choice task. Deaf participants performed better than the other groups for peripherally presented stimuli, suggesting that sign language acquisition alone does not change peripheral vision in the way that deafness does. Samar and Berger investigate the hypothesis of reallocation of attentional resources from the central to the peripheral visual field in the deaf, using a spatial attention paradigm requiring target localization. Comparing deaf participants with or without cochlear implants (CIs) with hearing participants, they surprisingly observed that deaf with no CIs show a reduced central attentional capacity which was not associated with enhanced peripheral attention. In the perception of faces, a left visual field bias typically exists which suggests a right hemisphere specialization. This bias is already observed in 5-year-old hearing children. Dole et al. found a reduced left visual field bias in deaf adults compare to hearing peers when using chimeric faces. This result was associated with increased looking time toward the mouth for deaf participants. Early profound deafness is therefore associated with differences in face scanning and could induce a change in hemispheric specialization possibly linked to speech reading. Pimperton et al. investigated whether deaf adults with CIs showed significantly better scores on a test of speechreading than hearing, hypothesizing that the age of implantation might influence this ability. They found that the deaf with CIs were better speechreaders than the hearing, with a significant positive correlation between age at implantation and speechreading performance: earlier implantation was associated with poorer speechreading scores. Aparicio et al. investigated the neural substrate of speech reading and speech with cued speech (CS) recruiting deaf individuals, CS users, and individuals with typical hearing. Their study explores the neural similarities and differences in processing oral language delivered in a visuo-manual or in an audio-visual modality. They found a common, amodal neural basis for the perception of both audiovisual speech and CS, but clear differences were observed in the posterior parts of the superior temporal sulcus for auditory and speechread information in audiovisual speech, and in the occipitotemporal junction for CS. Corina et al. recorded auditory and visual evoked potentials in hearing children and deaf children with CIs. They reported an atypical auditory P1 in the deaf children, even with early implantation and significant auditory experience, which they interpret as potentially reflecting an aberrant maturation of cortical function early in development. They found no differences in the visual evoked potentials. When analyzing the relationship between auditory P1 and visual N1 within participants, they found a significant correlation in the hearing children not in deaf children with CIs.

[学科分类] 心理学（综合）

[关键词] blindness;language deprivation;plasticity;cognitive development;spatial localization;auditory perception;visual perception;deafness