{"id":1595,"date":"2014-11-10T20:32:47","date_gmt":"2014-11-11T01:32:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/?p=1595"},"modified":"2017-06-27T15:08:15","modified_gmt":"2017-06-27T19:08:15","slug":"do-deaf-children-lack-attentional-control-how-language-may-be-the-answer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/2014\/11\/10\/do-deaf-children-lack-attentional-control-how-language-may-be-the-answer\/","title":{"rendered":"Do Deaf Children Lack Attentional Control? How Language may be the Answer"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Imagine being deaf. Do you think it would make it harder for you to pay attention to things? Make it easier to be impulsive? It is easy for many people to take for granted many of the things that they have in life. Especially some things as that are so seemingly common as a sense. However, for those people, such as deaf people, they know that there is much more to their struggle than it would appear. It is a common misconception that the only difference between those who are deaf and those who are not is the ability to hear. However, lacking the sense of hearing has far-reaching implications, some of which are still being discovered. One of these areas of implication is within the domain of attention. Attention is a fundamental cognitive ability in which one is able to select a particular stimulus from the environment and focus certain resources on it. For example, when one is in class there are many things happening all at once: other students are on their computers, maybe there is something happening outside the window, and\/or your phone is ringing in your pocket. As a student, you are expected to block out all of these distractions and focus your attention onto the teacher, and, specifically, what the teacher is saying.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Attention is probably one of the most critical cognitive functions. As cognitive psychologist David Strayer (2010) once said, \u201cAttention is the holy grail. Everything that you\u2019re conscious of, everything you let in, everything you remember and you forget, depends on it\u201d. Everything that we as people do on a day-to-day basis involves attention; something as insignificant as carrying on a conversation to something as complex as tackling a\u00a0problem in your calculus problem set, and everything in between. Many people assume that some things, like walking or talking for example, do not require attention, however, this is not the case. In addition, one can think of attention as limited. There is only a certain amount of attention that one has available, which can only be divided by so many things. Therefore, if a person has a breakdown in this domain of cognitive function, it can be extremely detrimental to their everyday life.<\/span><\/p>\n

It has long been thought that children who are deaf lack control over their attention, which causes them to act impulsively. However, in a study conducted in early 2014, two researchers, Dye and Hauser, set out to see if this was true. They did this by testing two different kinds of attention: sustained and selective.<\/span><\/p>\n

In sustained attention, the focus is on the duration of attention, and how long one can keep their attention focused on one stimulus. In selective attention, the focus is on keeping attention on one stimulus while there are other stimuli present. For example, if you needed to count all of the coins in a large jar, that would require sustained attention, whereas if you were to have to count all of the coins with someone talking in your ear the whole time, that would be selective attention (and also very difficult). <\/span><\/p>\n

The participants in this study fall into two different classifications: students who had absolutely no hearing problems and students who were deaf, raised by deaf parents and taught American Sign Language (ASL) from birth. The participants were from two different age groups in both the deaf and non-deaf conditions, ranging from 6-8 years old and 9-13 years old.<\/span><\/p>\n

The experimenters were able to test both types of attention using a visual continuous performance task (CPT). In this task, numbers appeared at the center of a screen. In one condition the child was required to press a button when the number 1 preceded the number 9, as shown in schema A below. The length and the accuracy of this task are used to determine sustained attention. The better a person performs this task is dependent on them pressing the button only in the one condition stated, and not missing the condition or pressing the button when the condition did not occur. This task also occurs over a certain period of time, and the length of the task implies that they are using sustained attention. <\/span><\/p>\n

A variation of the CPT was used for selective attention in which there isn\u2019t just one number that appears, but multiple. Numbers can appear either on one side of the target or the other, or on both sides of the target, and the target can either be present or not present. The child was asked to respond specifically to the middle number and press the button only when the middle number is a 9 preceded by a 1 that is also in the middle, as seen in schema B below. A person who is successful at this task has good selective attention because they are able to selectively focus on the central number, while not concentrating on the numbers on either side.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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In terms of sustained attention, the researchers found that there was no difference between children who were deaf and those who were not. Therefore, deaf and hearing children were able to press the button while attending to the target equally well. Considering that prior studies had reported deficits in sustain attention, this finding was surprising.<\/span><\/p>\n

In the selective attention task, the younger group of deaf children did comparatively worse than the hearing children of the same age. However this difference was not observed for the older group of deaf children. Therefore, it could be hypothesized that there is some sort of developmental delay for children who are deaf compared to those who are not in terms of developing selective attention. However, it is important to note that this only affects children when they are still young. <\/span><\/p>\n

Although it was formerly thought that deaf children were inattentive and impulsive based on multiple previous studies, the authors showed that this thought might not actually be true. Children that grow up with ASL as a first language do not necessarily fit within this category of impulsiveness, and are different than deaf children who grow up without deaf parents.<\/span><\/p>\n

However, it is very important to realize that not all children are fortunate to grow up in a family speaking ASL. In a very similar study done by Quittner et al. (1994), participants were fully hearing, deaf with cochlear implants or deaf with no cochlear implants. These researchers had very different findings from Dye and Hauser (2014); they found that children participants who were deaf lacked visual attention in comparison to those who were not, and they used this finding to support the observation that deaf children are more easily distracted.<\/span><\/p>\n

This brings up a very interesting question about the different environments that deaf children are raised in and how that can affect their cognitive abilities. These two papers indicate that there must be a difference between growing up with a language, such as ASL, from birth, and developing without language or acquiring language late. The importance of language in development is well known (click here<\/a>\u00a0to look at some of these examples from the Cog Blog), and is just as, if not more, applicable to the development of deaf children.<\/span><\/p>\n

All in all, parents of deaf children should make it a priority for their children to start learning ASL as early as possible, in order to ensure the proper cognitive development. This is especially true of the cognitive development of attention, which as shown earlier, is so vital to the daily living of each individual. <\/span><\/p>\n

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Click\u00a0<\/span><\/span>here<\/span><\/a>\u00a0<\/span><\/span>for link to article<\/span><\/p>\n

REFERENCES<\/span><\/p>\n

Dye, M. W. G., Hauser, P. C. (2014). Sustain attention, selective attention and cognitive control in deaf and hearing children.\u00a0<\/span>Hearing Research.<\/em>\u00a0<\/i><\/span>309, 94-102.<\/span><\/p>\n

Quittner, A. L, Smith, L. B., Osberger, M. J., Mitchell, T. V., Katz, D. B. (1994). TheImplact of Audition on the development of visual attention.\u00a0<\/span>Psychological Science.<\/em>\u00a0<\/i><\/span>5 (6), 347-353<\/span><\/p>\n

WikiHow. (2014) How to fingerspell the alphabet in American Sign Language. Date accessed: Nov 10, 2014. http:\/\/www.wikihow.com\/Fingerspell-the-Alphabet-in-American-Sign-Language<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Imagine being deaf. Do you think it would make it harder for you to pay attention to things? Make it easier to be impulsive? It is easy for many people to take for granted many of the things that they have in life. Especially some things as that are so seemingly common as a sense. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4027,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[80216,313,80217],"tags":[370822],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1595"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4027"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1595"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1595\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1612,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1595\/revisions\/1612"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1595"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1595"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1595"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}