Impact of early blindness on the spatial distribution of attention and rhythm perception : a psychophysical and brain imaging approach
(2015)
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- Abstract
- Vision is our dominant sense to apprehend the environment. How does a blind person compensate for this lack of information? The present thesis addresses this question in two domains: the distribution of auditory attention in the surrounding space and rhythm and beat processing. We demonstrated that early blind individuals have improved sound detection abilities in both frontal and peripheral spaces. However, the improvement was bigger for the peripheral space than the frontal one. In rhythm perception, we demonstrated, for the first time, the presence of improved beat asynchrony detection abilities in early blind individuals as well as a different profile of brain activity in several frontal areas during rhythm and beat perception in this population. All these behavioural and neural changes could be caused by an increased reliance on the preserved modalities and are informative about the type of brain plasticity that takes place following early blindness.
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Lerens, E. (2015). Impact of early blindness on the spatial distribution of attention and rhythm perception : a psychophysical and brain imaging approach. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/189705