Change blindness in profoundly deaf individuals and cochlear implant recipients

Abstract We used a change blindness paradigm to examine visual abilities in the profoundly deaf when exogenous capture of attention is prevented and only endogenous attention shifts are possible. Nineteen profoundly deaf participants, 22 cochlear implant recipients and 18 hearing controls were asked to detect a change occurring between two consecutive visual scenes separated by a blank. Changes occurred on half of the trials, either at central or peripheral locations, and the task was performed under focused attention (at the centre or at the periphery) or under distributed attention. When allowed to focus attention, all groups showed comparable change sensitivity, with better performance for central than peripheral stimuli. However, in the distributed condition, only the profoundly deaf participants remained reliably more sensitive to changes occurring at central than peripheral locations. This finding contradicts the well-known visual performance enhancement typically observed for peripheral regions of the visual field in the profoundly deaf. We suggest that this discrepancy between our novel finding and the existing literature reflects the strictly endogenous nature of our change blindness paradigm. Our results point to a differential role of exogenous and endogenous attention components in the multisensory plasticity occurring after auditory deprivation and suggest that compensatory abilities in the deaf may be linked to exogenous capture of visual attention.