کد مقاله کد نشریه سال انتشار مقاله انگلیسی نسخه تمام متن
10466216 925755 2009 5 صفحه PDF دانلود رایگان
عنوان انگلیسی مقاله ISI
Odour discrimination and identification are improved in early blindness
موضوعات مرتبط
علوم زیستی و بیوفناوری علم عصب شناسی علوم اعصاب رفتاری
پیش نمایش صفحه اول مقاله
Odour discrimination and identification are improved in early blindness
چکیده انگلیسی
Previous studies showed that early blind humans develop superior abilities in the use of their remaining senses, hypothetically due to a functional reorganization of the deprived visual brain areas. While auditory and tactile functions have been investigated for long, little is known about the effects of early visual deprivation on olfactory processing. However, blind humans make an extensive use of olfactory information in their daily life. Here we investigated olfactory discrimination and identification abilities in early blind subjects and age-matched sighted controls. Three levels of cuing were used in the identification task, i.e., free-identification (no cue), categorization (semantic cues) and multiple choice (semantic and phonological cues). Early blind subjects significantly outperformed the controls in odour discrimination, free-identification and categorization. In addition, the larger group difference was observed in the free-identification as compared to the categorization and the multiple choice conditions. This indicated that a better access to the semantic information from odour perception accounted for part of the improved olfactory performances in odour identification in the blind. We concluded that early blind subjects have both improved perceptual abilities and a better access to the information stored in semantic memory than sighted subjects.
ناشر
Database: Elsevier - ScienceDirect (ساینس دایرکت)
Journal: Neuropsychologia - Volume 47, Issue 14, December 2009, Pages 3079-3083
نویسندگان
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