Enhancement of Visual Motion Detection Thresholds in Early Deaf People

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Abstract

In deaf people, the auditory cortex can reorganize to support visual motion processing. Although this cross-modal reorganization has long been thought to subserve enhanced visual abilities, previous research has been unsuccessful at identifying behavioural enhancements specific to motion processing. Recently, research with congenitally deaf cats has uncovered an enhancement for visual motion detection. Our goal was to test for a similar difference between deaf and hearing people. We tested 16 early and profoundly deaf participants and 20 hearing controls. Participants completed a visual motion detection task, in which they were asked to determine which of two sinusoidal gratings was moving. The speed of the moving grating varied according to an adaptive staircase procedure, allowing us to determine the lowest speed necessary for participants to detect motion. Consistent with previous research in deaf cats, the deaf group had lower motion detection thresholds than the hearing. This finding supports the proposal that cross-modal reorganization after sensory deprivation will occur for supramodal sensory features and preserve the output functions.

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Most cited references 30

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Cross-modal plasticity: where and how?

Daphne Bavelier, Helen J. Neville (2002)

Animal studies have shown that sensory deprivation in one modality can have striking effects on the development of the remaining modalities. Although recent studies of deaf and blind humans have also provided convincing behavioural, electrophysiological and neuroimaging evidence of increased capabilities and altered organization of spared modalities, there is still much debate about the identity of the brain systems that are changed and the mechanisms that mediate these changes. Plastic changes across brain systems and related behaviours vary as a function of the timing and the nature of changes in experience. This specificity must be understood in the context of differences in the maturation rates and timing of the associated critical periods, differences in patterns of transiently existing connections, and differences in molecular factors across brain systems.

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Cross-modal plasticity in specific auditory cortices underlies visual compensations in the deaf.

Stephen G. Lomber, M Meredith, Andrej Kral (2010)

When the brain is deprived of input from one sensory modality, it often compensates with supranormal performance in one or more of the intact sensory systems. In the absence of acoustic input, it has been proposed that cross-modal reorganization of deaf auditory cortex may provide the neural substrate mediating compensatory visual function. We tested this hypothesis using a battery of visual psychophysical tasks and found that congenitally deaf cats, compared with hearing cats, have superior localization in the peripheral field and lower visual movement detection thresholds. In the deaf cats, reversible deactivation of posterior auditory cortex selectively eliminated superior visual localization abilities, whereas deactivation of the dorsal auditory cortex eliminated superior visual motion detection. Our results indicate that enhanced visual performance in the deaf is caused by cross-modal reorganization of deaf auditory cortex and it is possible to localize individual visual functions in discrete portions of reorganized auditory cortex.

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Do deaf individuals see better?

Daphne Bavelier, Matthew Dye, Peter Hauser (2006)

The possibility that, following early auditory deprivation, the remaining senses such as vision are enhanced has been met with much excitement. However, deaf individuals exhibit both better and worse visual skills than hearing controls. We show that, when deafness is considered to the exclusion of other confounds, enhancements in visual cognition are noted. The changes are not, however, widespread but are selective, limited, as we propose, to those aspects of vision that are attentionally demanding and would normally benefit from auditory-visual convergence. The behavioral changes are accompanied by a reorganization of multisensory areas, ranging from higher-order cortex to early cortical areas, highlighting cross-modal interactions as a fundamental feature of brain organization and cognitive processing.

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Author and article information

Contributors

Maurice Ptito: Role: Editor

Journal

Journal ID (nlm-ta): PLoS One

Journal ID (iso-abbrev): PLoS ONE

Journal ID (publisher-id): plos

Journal ID (pmc): plosone

Title: PLoS ONE

Publisher: Public Library of Science (San Francisco, USA )

ISSN (Electronic): 1932-6203

Publication date Collection: 2014

Publication date (Electronic): 28 February 2014

Volume: 9

Issue: 2

Electronic Location Identifier: e90498

Affiliations

[1 ]Montreal Neurological Institute, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada

[2 ]BRAMS: International Laboratory for Brain, Music, and Sound Research, Montreal, Quebec, Canada

[3 ]CRBLM Centre for Research on Brain, Language, and Music, Montreal, Quebec, Canada

[4 ]École d’orthophonie et d’audiologie, Université de Montréal, Montreal, Quebec, Canada

[5 ]Centre de recherche interdisciplinaire en réadaptation du Montréal métropolitain – Institut Raymond Dewar, Montreal, Quebec, Canada

University of Montreal, Canada

Author notes

* E-mail: martha.shiell@ 123456mail.mcgill.ca

Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exit.

Conceived and designed the experiments: MMS FC RJZ. Performed the experiments: MMS. Analyzed the data: MMS FC RJZ. Wrote the paper: MMS FC RJZ.

Article

Publisher ID: PONE-D-13-50535

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0090498

PMC ID: 3938732

PubMed ID: 24587381

SO-VID: 893fba44-ef59-4fee-bda0-ba0b70592f34

License:

This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

History

Date received : 30 November 2013

Date accepted : 3 February 2014

Page count

Pages: 4

Funding

This work was supported by grants from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research ( www.cihr-irsc.gc.ca) to RJZ; the Canada Fund for Innovation (innovation.ca) to RJZ; the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council to RJZ ( www.nserc-crsng.gc.ca); an Interdisciplinary Graduate Student Award from the Centre for Research on Brain, Language, and Music to MMS, RJZ, and FC ( www.crblm.ca); and by a Centre of Excellence for Commercialization and Research award to the Montreal Neurological Institute ( www.nce-rce.gc.ca). FC was supported by grants from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada; and Fonds de Recherche Santé Québec ( www.frsq.gouv.qc.ca). MMS was supported by a Vanier Canada Graduate fellowship ( www.vanier.gc.ca). The funder's had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

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Enhancement of Visual Motion Detection Thresholds in Early Deaf People

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Most cited references 30

Cross-modal plasticity: where and how?

Cross-modal plasticity in specific auditory cortices underlies visual compensations in the deaf.

Do deaf individuals see better?

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