In the absence of auditory information, deaf individuals must make use of their visual systems during communication. Without hearing the tone of voice of a speaker, deaf individuals rely heavily on facial expressions to understand the emotional state of others. Deaf individuals who use sign language place particular importance on facial expressions during daily communication, since the face is used to convey both grammatical and emotional content. This proposal relates directly to the mission statement of the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD), as it seeks to determine the ways in which the visual system is able to gather emotion and identity information from faces following the loss of hearing. The proposed studies will track the location of gaze while hearing and deaf individuals look at faces with various emotional expressions. They will also measure the tendency to use different regions of the face while processing the emotional content or the identity of a face. Finally, they will measure the underlying neural mechanisms that may drive these changes in attention and gaze. Together, these studies will provide an account of the effects of deafness and experience with visual communication through sign language on human behavior towards faces. This proposal has important implications for public health by providing evidence that face perception changes with experience. This evidence will support the development of behavioral training programs to help those with communication disorders use facial expressions to support communication. In particular, such training programs would benefit individuals with autism, who often have difficulty decoding facial expressions, and individuals with any level of hearing loss, including older adults who have recently lost their hearing and those who are adapting to life with a cochlear implant. In addition, this research will benefit hearing adults seeking to communicate better with the deaf population, a traditionally underserved group, by providing a better understanding of the ways that the face can be used during communication. ? ? ? ?
| Letourneau, Susan M; Mitchell, Teresa V (2013) Visual field bias in hearing and deaf adults during judgments of facial expression and identity. Front Psychol 4:319 |
| Letourneau, Susan M; Mitchell, Teresa V (2011) Gaze patterns during identity and emotion judgments in hearing adults and deaf users of American Sign Language. Perception 40:563-75 |
