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. Author manuscript; available in PMC: 2010 Jun 15.
Published in final edited form as: Trends Cogn Sci. 2006 Oct 2;10(11):512–518. doi: 10.1016/j.tics.2006.09.006

Figure 2.

Figure 2

(a) The extent to which central versus peripheral distractors interfere with the target task can be computed as a difference ratio: (central — peripheral)/(central + peripheral). Both hearing non-signers and hearing signers demonstrate positive ratios, indicating more interference from central than peripheral distractors. Deaf subjects, however, demonstrate negative ratios, indicating more interference from peripheral distractors. This suggests that deafness, not sign language use, is the driving factor behind enhanced distribution of attention to the periphery in adults with early deafness. (b) The same ratio can be calculated using MT/MST activation data from an fMRI task. Again, positive values are observed for hearing non-signers and hearing signers, indicating greater activation when attention is directed towards the center of the visual field. A negative value for Deaf subjects indicates the reverse pattern, reflecting the greater sensitivity to peripheral events in the Deaf population at the level of neural organization.