Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Deaf (n = 37) and hearing (n = 37) subjects ages 6-7, 9-10, and 18 + participated in a visual attention experiment designed to test the hypothesis that vision in the deaf becomes specialized over developmental time to detect change in the visual field. All children, regardless of hearing status, should attend to change in the visual field. However, the differing developmental experiences and sensory "tools" between deaf and hearing create different demands on their visual systems. Hearing individuals may become capable of ignoring many changes in the visual field because they can simulUneously monitor the world auditorially and attend to task-relevant information visually. If so, then deaf individuals may find it difficult to ignore change in the visual field because their visual system must both monitor the world and attend to task-relevant information without simultaneous auditory input. Subjects in this experiment completed two attentional capture tasks in which they searched for a uniquely shaped target in the presence of two irrelevant stimulus manipulations (color or motion). This manipulation was applied to the target on half tbe task trials and to a distractor on tbe other half. Attention to the irrelevant manipulations will create differential reaction times (RTs) when the target is manipulated versus when a distractor is manipulated. Results indicated divergent development between the two groups. Both deaf and hearing children produced differential RTs in the two tasks, while only deaf adults attended to the task-irrelevant changes. Further, while hearing subjects were more affected by motion than color, deaf subjects are more equally affected by both. Results are discussed as compensatory changes in visual processing as a result of auditory deprivation.