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- Title
Deaf, blind or deaf-blind: Is touch enhanced?
- Authors
Papagno, Costanza; Cecchetto, Carlo; Pisoni, Alberto; Bolognini, Nadia
- Abstract
When someone looses one type of sensory input, s/he may compensate by using the sensory information conveyed by other senses. To verify whether loosing a sense or two has consequences on a spared sensory modality, namely touch, and whether these consequences depend on the type of sensory loss, we investigated the effects of deafness and blindness on temporal and spatial tactile tasks in deaf, blind and deaf-blind people. Deaf and deaf-blind people performed the spatial tactile task better than the temporal one, while blind and controls showed the opposite pattern. Deaf and deaf-blind participants were impaired in temporal discrimination as compared to controls, while deaf-blind individuals outperformed blind participants in the spatial tactile task. Overall, sensory-deprived participants did not show an enhanced tactile performance. We speculate that discriminative touch is not so relevant in humans, while social touch is. Probably, more complex tactile tasks would have revealed an increased performance in sensory-deprived people.
- Subjects
DEAFNESS; BLINDNESS; SENSORY neurons; BRAIN research; PSYCHOLOGICAL research; TASK performance
- Publication
Experimental Brain Research, 2016, Vol 234, Issue 2, p627
- ISSN
0014-4819
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1007/s00221-015-4488-1