The power of vision: calibration of auditory space after sight restoration from congenital cataracts

Abstract

Early visual deprivation typically results in spatial impairments in other sensory modalities. It has been suggested that, since vision provides the most accurate spatial information, it is used for calibrating space in the other senses. Here we investigated whether sight restoration after prolonged early onset visual impairment can lead to the development of more accurate auditory space perception. We tested participants who were surgically treated for congenital dense bilateral cataracts several years after birth. In Experiment 1 we assessed participants’ ability to understand spatial relationships among sounds, by asking them to spatially bisect three consecutive, laterally separated sounds. Participants performed better after surgery than participants tested before. However, they still performed worse than sighted controls. In Experiment 2, we demonstrated that single sound localization in the two-dimensional frontal plane improves quickly after surgery, approaching performance levels of sighted controls. Such recovery seems to be mediated by visual acuity, as participants gaining higher post-surgical visual acuity performed better in both experiments. These findings provide strong support for the hypothesis that vision calibrates auditory space perception. Importantly, this also demonstrates that this process can occur even when vision is restored after years of visual deprivation.