Is visual selective attention in deaf individuals enhanced or deficient? The Case of useful field of view

Background: Early deafness leads to enhanced attention in the visual periphery. Yet, whether this enhancement confers advantages in everyday life remains unknown, as deaf individuals have. been shown to be more distracted by irrelevant information in the periphery than their hearing peers. Here, we ~how that, in a complex attentional task, a performance advantage results for deaf individuals. Methodology/Principal Findings: We employed the Useful Field of View (UFOV) which requires central target identification concurrent with peripheral target localization in the presence of distraetors a divided, selective attention task. First, the comparison of deaf and hearing adults with or without sign language skills establishes that deafness and not sign language use drives UFOV enhancement. Second, UFOV performance was enhanced in deaf children, but only after 11 years of age. Conclusions/Significance: This work demonstrates that, following early auditory deprivation, visual attention resources toward the periphery slowly get augmented to eventually result in a clear behavioral advantage by pre-adolescence on a selective visual attention task. Citation: Dye MWG, Hauser PC, Bavelier D (2009) Is Visual Selective Attention in Deaf Individuals Enhanced or Deficient? The Case of the Useful Field of View. PLoS ONE 4(S): eS640. doi:l0.1371/journal.pone.000S640 Editor: Chris I. Baker, National Institute of Mental Health. United States of America Received January 22, 2009; Accepted April 20, 2009; Published May 20, 2009 Copyright: tel 2009 Dye et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Funding: This work was supported by grants from the John F. Merck Foundation and NIDCD to DB, and from the Visual Language and Learning NSF Science and Learning Center to PH. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. * E-mail: [email protected]