The major documented effect of auditory deprivation on visual processing is enhanced spatial attention, in particular to the visual periphery and to moving stimuli. However, there is a parallel literature that has reported deficits in temporal aspects of visual processing in individuals with profound hearing losses. This study builds upon previous work showing possible deficits in processing of rapid serial visual presentation streams in deaf children [Restorative Neurology and Neuroscience (2010), 28, 181–192]. Deaf native signers of American Sign Language and hearing children and adults were asked to perform a 2-AFC identification task with a visual target embedded in a stream of visual stimuli presented at 6 Hz. Both children and adults displayed attentional awakening, whereby target identification accuracy improved as the number of stimuli preceding the target increased. For deaf children, however, this awakening effect was less pronounced than that observed in hearing children, interpreted as difficulty sustaining entrainment to the stimulus stream. The data provide the first account of attentional awakening in children, showing that it improves across the 6–13 year age range. They also provide additional support to the possibility of domain-general alterations in the processing of temporal information in the absence of auditory input.
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机译：有记录的听觉剥夺对视觉处理的主要作用是增强了空间注意力，特别是对视觉外围和运动刺激的注意力。然而，有平行文献报道患有严重听力损失的个体在视觉处理的时间方面存在缺陷。这项研究建立在先前的研究基础上，该研究表明聋儿快速连续视觉呈现过程的处理可能存在缺陷[Restorative Neurology and Neuroscience（2010），28，181–192]。美国手语的聋哑本国签名者和听力正常的儿童和成年人被要求执行2-AFC识别任务，其视觉目标嵌入6 Hz呈现的视觉刺激流中。儿童和成年人都表现出注意力觉醒，因此，随着目标前方刺激次数的增加，目标识别的准确性也会提高。然而，对于失聪儿童来说，这种觉醒效果不如在听觉儿童中观察到的那么明显，这被解释为难以维持对刺激流的夹带。数据首次提供了儿童注意觉醒的信息，表明它在6-13岁的年龄范围内有所改善。它们还为在没有听觉输入的情况下处理时间信息时域一般更改的可能性提供了额外的支持。
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