title: Deaf, blind or deaf-blind: Is touch enhanced?
abstract: When someone looses one type of sensory input, s/he may compensate by using the sensory information conveyed by other senses. To verify whether loosing a sense or two has consequences on a spared sensory modality, namely touch, and whether these consequences depend on the type of sensory loss, we investigated the effects of deafness and blindness on temporal and spatial tactile tasks in deaf, blind and deaf-blind people. Deaf and deaf-blind people performed the spatial tactile task better than the temporal one, while blind and controls showed the opposite pattern. Deaf and deaf-blind participants were impaired in temporal discrimination as compared to controls, while deaf-blind individuals outperformed blind participants in the spatial tactile task. Overall, sensory-deprived participants did not show an enhanced tactile performance. We speculate that discriminative touch is not so relevant in humans, while social touch is. Probably, more complex tactile tasks would have revealed an increased performance in sensory-deprived people.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Milano-Bicocca, Piazza dell'Ateneo Nuovo 1, 20126, Milan, Italy. costanza.papagno@unimib.it.|NeuroMI, Milan Centre for Neuroscience, Milan, Italy. costanza.papagno@unimib.it.
authors.forename: Costanza
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Papagno
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Milano-Bicocca, Piazza dell'Ateneo Nuovo 1, 20126, Milan, Italy.
authors.forename: Carlo
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Cecchetto
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Milano-Bicocca, Piazza dell'Ateneo Nuovo 1, 20126, Milan, Italy.|NeuroMI, Milan Centre for Neuroscience, Milan, Italy.
authors.forename: Alberto
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Pisoni
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Milano-Bicocca, Piazza dell'Ateneo Nuovo 1, 20126, Milan, Italy.|NeuroMI, Milan Centre for Neuroscience, Milan, Italy.|Laboratory of Neuropsychology, IRCCS Istituto Auxologico Italiano, Milan, Italy.
authors.forename: Nadia
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Bolognini
mesh_terms: D000161:Acoustic Stimulation / Q000379:methods; D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D001307:Auditory Perception / Q000502:physiology; D001766:Blindness / Q000503:physiopathology* / Q000523:psychology; D003638:Deafness / Q000503:physiopathology* / Q000523:psychology; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D010775:Photic Stimulation / Q000379:methods; D014110:Touch / Q000502:physiology*; D014796:Visual Perception / Q000502:physiology; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Blindness; Deaf-blind; Deafness; Tactile spatial discrimination; Tactile temporal discrimination