The Impact of Audition on the Development of Visual Attention

Abstract

Interactions between audition and vision were investigated in two experiments In the first experiment, school-age hearing children, deaf children with cochlear implants, and deaf children without implants participated in a task in which they were to respond to some visual signals and not others This task did not involve sound at all Deaf children without implants performed much more poorly than hearing children Deaf children with cochlear implants performed considerably better than deaf children without implants The second experiment employed a longitudinal design and showed that the rate of development in visual selective attention was faster for deaf children with cochlear implants than deaf children without implants Moreover, the gains were rapid—occurring within 2 years post-implant surgery The results suggest that a history of experience with sounds matters in the development of visual attention The results are discussed in terms of multimodal developmental processes