title: A visual processing advantage for young-adolescent deaf observers: Evidence from face and object matching tasks.
abstract: It is unresolved whether the permanent auditory deprivation that deaf people experience leads to the enhanced visual processing of faces. The current study explored this question with a matching task in which observers searched for a target face among a concurrent lineup of ten faces. This was compared with a control task in which the same stimuli were presented upside down, to disrupt typical face processing, and an object matching task. A sample of young-adolescent deaf observers performed with higher accuracy than hearing controls across all of these tasks. These results clarify previous findings and provide evidence for a general visual processing advantage in deaf observers rather than a face-specific effect.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychological Sciences, College of Education, Qatar University, Qatar.
authors.forename: Ahmed M
authors.initials: AM
authors.lastname: Megreya
authors.affiliation: School of Psychology, University of Kent, UK.
authors.forename: Markus
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Bindemann
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D002648:Child; D003638:Deafness / Q000503:physiopathology / Q000523:psychology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D014796:Visual Perception; D055815:Young Adult