Visual movement perception in deaf and hearing individuals

A number of studies have investigated changes in the perception of visual motionas a result of altered sensory experiences. An animal study has shown thatauditory-deprived cats exhibit enhanced performance in a visual movementdetection task compared to hearing cats (Lomber,Meredith, & Kral, 2010). In humans, the behavioural evidenceregarding the perception of motion is less clear. The present study investigateddeaf and hearing adult participants using a movement localization task and adirection of motion task employing coherently-moving and static visual dotpatterns. Overall, deaf and hearing participants did not differ in theirmovement localization performance, although within the deaf group, a left visualfield advantage was found. When discriminating the direction of motion, however,deaf participants responded faster and tended to be more accurate when detectingsmall differences in direction compared with the hearing controls. These resultsconform to the view that visual abilities are enhanced after auditorydeprivation and extend previous findings regarding visual motion processing indeaf individuals.