Neural correlates of visual processing in deaf infants
Research type
Research Study
Full title
An electroencephalography study of the neural correlates of visual habituation in infants with hearing loss
IRAS ID
305670
Contact name
Claire Monroy
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
Keele University
Duration of Study in the UK
2 years, 11 months, 31 days
Research summary
Infants and children with hearing loss demonstrate differences in performance on a range of domain-general, nonverbal cognitive skills compared with their hearing peers. These include foundational abilities like sustained attention, working memory, and learning, leading some researchers to hypothesize that auditory deprivation early in life contributes to widespread delays in fundamental cognitive skills. These delays have cascading effects on other domains of development and may partially explain the difficulties that deaf children exhibit in their academic and social lives. However, we cannot infer the underlying mechanisms from simply observing a difference. It is unknown whether this difference reflects a deficit, or whether it reflects a potentially functional adaptation of deaf infants to their atypical sensory environment.
To answer this question, this study will examine neural correlates of visual habituation in deaf infants. Habituation is a well-established phenomenon that reflects encoding: infants lose attention to a continually presented stimulus as they gradually encode a memory trace for the stimulus. A recent study demonstrated a difference in visual habituation between deaf and hearing infants—specifically, deaf infants took longer to habituate to a visual stimulus than an age-matched group of hearing infants. These findings were interpreted as indicating that the deaf infants were slower to encode visual information to memory, and possibly less efficient at processing the visual information. However, an alternative possibility is that deaf infants are encoding a stronger memory for the stimulus or showing deeper sustained attention, which would also lead to longer looking times. These cognitive indices may not be reflected in overt infant behaviour, making them ideally suited for event-related potential (ERP) methods. In this project, we will use electroencephalography (EEG) to compare specific ERP responses during visual habituation to uncover the mechanisms that drive previously observed differences between deaf and hearing infants.
REC name
North West - Preston Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
23/NW/0363
Date of REC Opinion
16 Jan 2024
REC opinion
Further Information Favourable Opinion