General Statement
According to a new study by Johns Hopkins University and the University of California, Irvine, Blind people can remember speech and language better than sighted people. The reason behind that according to the study is that blind people use language as a mental tool to remember information.
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Marina Bedny, an associate professor of psychology and brain sciences at Johns Hopkins, said that “It’s interesting that people who are blind only showed an advantage with verbal memory. Blind people may use language like a mental tool to remember information.”
Based on an article published in neuroscience news, researchers conducted two memory tests with 20 blind adults and 22 blindfolded sighted adults. They wondered if blind participants would outperform sighted ones at remembering spoken sounds.
Steps
First, participants listened to a series of letters, followed by a delay. Then they heard either the same series or a “foil” series where a letter is replaced or put into the wrong position. Participants then judged whether the second series of letters was the same as the first.
For the second test, they listened to letters while solving mathematical equations with proposed answers. Participants determined if equation solutions were correct, followed by reciting back the letters.
As the researchers expected, according to neuroscience News, blind participants outperformed sighted ones in remembering speech. The results from another testing phase, which required solving mathematical equations and recalling letters, confirmed the researchers’ predictions. Blind participants again remembered more letters than sighted participants despite being forced to multitask mentally.
“On a daily basis, blind people use their memory much more to remember things, while sighted people can rely on visual clues to recall information,” said Karen Arcos, lead author and a blind postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Santa Cruz who earned her Ph.D. at University of California, Irvine.
“We think blind people’s advantages on the verbal tests stem from increased practice remembering information. The brain area responsible for vision in sighted people, the ‘visual’ cortex, is repurposed for other functions in blind people. Perhaps it enhances blind people’s language processing.”
“By using meaningless sound effects, we prevented participants from using language to remember them this lowered blind people’s usual memory advantage,” said Bedny.
Further Research
Bedny is now studying what enables blind people to outperform sighted people at remembering words, letters, and numbers. Moreover, she plans to examine if the “visual” cortex contributes to improved memory for speech and language in those born blind.
Credit to: Neuroscience News
