Auditory Spatial Bisection of Blind and Normally Sighted Individuals in Free Field and Virtual Acoustics.
Stefanie Goicke, Florian Denk, Tim Jürgens
PMID 38361245WHAT IT FOUND
Virtual audio via headphones severely degraded rear sound localization for all participants, while frontal performance remained comparable to real loudspeakers.
Blind individuals performed as well as sighted controls in free field, contradicting prior reports of specific spatial deficits in blindness.
Key findings
01Headphone-based virtual audio caused a three- to four-fold increase in error thresholds for rear sound localization compared to real loudspeakers, whereas frontal performance was only slightly worse.
02There were no significant differences in spatial bisection performance between sighted, blindfolded, or blind individuals in either presentation mode or incidence direction.
03Contrary to previous studies showing blind individuals struggle with spatial bisection, all participants in this study, including those blind from birth, were able to perform the task.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The blind group was significantly older on average (mean 43 years) than the sighted group (mean 29 years), which may confound comparisons given age-related changes in hearing. The study used generic head-related impulse responses for headphones, which do not match individual ear shapes and may exaggerate the difficulty of virtual rear localization. Some blind participants had residual light sensitivity, which may have aided calibration, unlike fully blind individuals in prior studies. The sample size of blind participants was small (n=8).
Declared interests
No conflicts of interest or funding sources are explicitly stated in the provided text.
The easy way to misread this
Do not assume that blind individuals have impaired auditory spatial bisection abilities based on older literature. This study found no performance difference between blind and sighted groups in free-field conditions, suggesting that previous findings of deficit may be specific to certain testing setups or participant characteristics not present here.