New Study Shows Deaf Adults Have Much Better Side Vision

Scientists have found that adults who are deaf develop much better peripheral vision, which is the ability to see things outside the center of the eyes' focus. Researchers from the Universities of York and Sheffield compared 16 deaf adults and 16 hearing adults using MRI scans and visual tests. The tests showed that deaf adults respond much better to objects and movements at the far edges of their eyesight. This gives them an extra advantage in noticing their surroundings and spotting danger. The human brain adapts to sensory loss by rewiring itself and sharing its resources differently. In deaf people, the primary visual cortex and a visual relay center deep in the brain called the lateral geniculate nucleus give more weight to far-peripheral vision. Dr. Heidi Baseler from the University of York and the Hull York Medical School explained that the brain does not make its overall visual capacity bigger. Instead, it makes a trade-off by shifting its existing resources around. This adjustment helps deaf people catch unexpected events just outside their central view that hearing people would normally notice through sound, such as avoiding a car crash. This study was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. This finding supports the long-held idea of a compensation effect where people with a sensory loss get stronger abilities in other senses. For example, a paper published 20 years ago in the International Journal of Industrial Ergonomics showed that people with blindness had higher hearing thresholds than sighted people. Researchers say these insights could help future product designers include human factors for visually disabled users.