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Scientific article
English

Motion velocity thresholds in deaf signers: changes in lateralization but not in overall sensitivity

Contributors

Brozinsky, Craig J; Bavelier, Daphné

Published in

Cognitive Brain Research, vol. 21, no. 1, p. 1-10

Publication date

2004

Abstract

In a series of three experiments, we tested whether deaf native signers process motion velocity information differently from hearing nonsigners. In Experiment 1, participants watched radially moving dots and were asked to detect the quadrant in which the velocity of the dots had changed. Similar 79% thresholds were observed in the two populations. In Experiments 2 and 3, peripheral and central thresholds were assessed separately as previous studies suggest early deafness leads mainly to changes in the processing of visual peripheral information. Neither condition produced an overall population difference. These negative results were not due to a lack of sensitivity in our experiments. Indeed, as has been previously reported, deaf native signers exhibited better thresholds in the right than in the left visual field, whereas the opposite pattern was observed in the hearing. This effect appears triggered by experience with American Sign Language (ASL) rather than deafness per se. Overall, this study confirms that early deafness does not enhance motion processing, and suggests that most of the changes previously described in the literature are instead attributable to changes in attention, and possibly special alterations of attention-to-motion processes.

Keywords

  • Adult
  • Deafness/physiopathology/psychology
  • Female
  • Fixation
  • Ocular/physiology
  • Functional Laterality/physiology
  • Hearing/physiology
  • Humans
  • Magnetic Resonance Imaging
  • Male
  • Motion Perception/physiology
  • Psychomotor Performance/physiology
  • Sensory Thresholds/physiology
  • Sign Language
  • Visual Fields/physiology

Note

Research report

UNIGE affiliation entities

Not a UNIGE publication

Citation (ISO format)

BROZINSKY, Craig J, BAVELIER, Daphné. Motion velocity thresholds in deaf signers: changes in lateralization but not in overall sensitivity. In: Cognitive Brain Research, 2004, vol. 21, n° 1, p. 1–10. doi: 10.1016/j.cogbrainres.2004.05.002

Main files (1)

Article (Published version)

Identifiers

Journal ISSN

0926-6410
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Technical informations

Creation

27/02/2018 11:14:00

First validation

27/02/2018 11:14:00

Update

13/10/2025 19:15:00

Status update

15/03/2023 08:02:33

Last indexation

01/09/2026 11:51:14
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