Table 1.
Overview of the results reviewed in Section 2, presenting evidence for structural and functional differences in auditory and haptic perception between visually impaired and sighted people.
| Paper | Main Results | Method |
|---|---|---|
| Park et al. [13] | Differences in cortical thickness, volume and area between VIPs and SCs. | MRI |
| Stevens and Weaver [14] | CBs show better TOJ and ABM performance than SCs. | Behavioral |
| Després et al. [15] | CBs are faster than SCs at locating a sound source from behind them in the vertical plain but not straight ahead. No significant differences in the horizontal plane. | Behavioral |
| Röder et al. [16] | In the peripheral condition N1 amplitude decreased faster for CBs than SCs indicating that CBs process peripheral auditory stimuli more efficiently than sighted people, but sighted people respond more accurately to central auditory stimuli. | Behavioral and EEG |
| Voss et al. [17] | No differnece between the performance of EBs and SCs when binaurally locating sound sources in the horizontal plane but a EB-subgroup performed worse in the vertical plane. | Behavioral |
| Finocdhietti et al. [18] | VIPs and SCs show similar performance in detecting the direction of a moving sound, but the performance of EBs in locating the end point of the moving sound is worse than for both LBs and SCs. | Behavioral |
| Fieger et al. [19] | SCs were slower in responding to peripheral than to central auditory stimuli. LBs were slower than the SCs but equally fast in responding to peripheral and central stimuli. | Behavioral |
| Fieger et al. [19] | CBs and LBs process peripheral auditory stimuli more efficiently than sighted people. | EEG |
| Lerens and Renier [20] | EBs respond faster to both central and peripheral auditory stimuli than Scs | Behavioral |
| Lessard et al. [21] | Found no differences in sound localization performance between congenital blind participants and sighted participants but the performance of their participants that had some residual sight was inferior compared to the other groups | Behavioral |
| Voss et al. [22,23] | No differences found between VIPs and SC, neither in locating sound sorces or comparing sound soureces locations | Behavioral |
| Gori et al. [24] | When judging whether the left or the right sound were closer to a central sound the CBs performed at chance level while the SCs solved the task adequately. | Behavioral |
| Gori et al. [24] | When comparing the distance of the first and third sound to the middle sound and when judging whether the sound was to the left or right of the base sound the performance of the CBs and SCs did not differ. | Behavioral |
| Röder et al. [25] | CBs responded significantly faster to acoustic stimuli than SCs. | Behavioral and EEG |
| Occelli et al. [26] | CBs showed lower JNDs than SCs in judging whether an auditory or tactile stimulus appeared first when stimuli appeared at different locations. | Behavioral |
| Röder et al. [27] | Better TOJ for CBs than LBs and SCs when comparing tactile stimuli. | Behavioral |
| Hötting and Röder [28] | When 3 or 4 tones are presented along with haptic stimuli the tones influence the performance less for CBs than SCs. | Behavioral |
| Hötting et al. [29,30] | CBs responded significantly faster to tactile stimuli than SCs but the difference was not significant for auditory stimuli. | Behavioral and EEG |
| Hötting et al. [29,30] | The initial selection process of simultaneously presented haptic and auditory stimuli may involve similar brain areas in CBs and SCs. The selection mechanism might however differ when stimuli have to be filtered by two factors (location and modality). | Behavioral and EEG |
| Wan et al. [31] | CBs and EBs, but not LBs, show better pitch and timbre discrimination than matched SCs. | Behavioral |
| Postma et al. [32] | Both EBs and LBs were faster than sighted blindfolded people (SB) in putting geometric shapes in their correct places on a wooden board. After rotating the board 90° the VIPs were still faster than the Sbs | Behavioral |
| Withagen et al. [33] | VIPs faster than SCs in haptically comparing artificial objects and telling whether they were the same or not. | Behavioral |
| Goldreich and Kanics [34] | VIPs show better tactile acuity than SCs. | Behavioral |