Abstract: | The individuals who have experienced hearing loss must rely on information obtained from their spared senses to process time. There have two competing hypotheses to explain the effect of hearing loss on temporal perception. The generalized-deficiency hypothesis proposes that an auditory deficit may affect the neurological development and organization of visual systems so that total reactivity of the organism is affected. However, perception compensation hypothesis indicates that deafness may result in enhanced or unaffected perceptual abilities as a consequence of brain reorganization. The aim of this study was to explore the influence of hearing loss on temporal perception of deaf students and its mechanism.The study employed a simultaneity judgment (SJ) task and a duration bisection task. The SJ experiment used a 2 (Group: deaf students, ordinary students) × 4 (Position: L3R3, L3R8, L8R3, L8R8) mixed design, which required subjects to judge whether two figures appearing at the same time or at a very short interval (-133 ms, -66 ms, -33 ms, -16 ms, 0 ms, 16 ms, 33 ms, 66 ms, or 133ms) were presented simultaneously or non-simultaneously. A total of fifteen deaf college students and fifteen ordinary college students volunteered for SJ experiment. The duration bisection experiment used a 2 (Group: deaf students, ordinary students) × 3 (Position: center, left, right) mixed design, which required subjects to judge whether one of the seven probe durations (1000 ms, 1500 ms, 2000 ms, 2500 ms, 3000 ms, 3500 ms, or 4000 ms) was more similar to a long or a short standard duration (4000 ms, and 1000 ms). A total of fourteen deaf college students and fourteen ordinary college students volunteered for this experiment.The study results showed that in SJ experiment, compared to ordinary students, the point of subjective simultaneity (PSS) and the standard deviation (SD) of the response distribution among deaf students were significantly increased, and there was no significant main effect of position and interaction effect. In duration bisection experiment, the Weber ration (WR) among deaf students was higher significantly than the ordinary students; However, there was no significant difference in bisection point (BP) between them. In conclusion, hearing loss impaired the accuracy and sensitivity of simultaneity perception and the sensitivity of duration perception in the visual channel among deaf students, which supported generalized-deficiency hypothesis. However, the accuracy of duration perception was not significantly affected by hearing loss, which supported perception compensation hypothesis. Therefore, hearing loss may have a selective mechanism influencing temporal perception of deaf students, which mainly depends on different temporal tasks and perceptual attributes. |