Visuospatial and Tactile Working Memory in Individuals with Congenital Deafness

Studies examining visuospatial working memory (WM) in individuals with congenital deafness have yielded inconsistent results, and tactile WM has rarely been examined. The current study examined WM span tasks in the two modalities among 20 individuals with congenital deafness and 20 participants with typical hearing. The congenital deafness group had longer forward and backward spans than typical hearing participants in a computerized Corsi block-tapping test (Visuospatial Span), whereas no such difference was found in the Tactual Span (tactile WM). In the congenital deafness group, age of sign language acquisition was not correlated with either condition of the visuospatial task, and Tactual and Visuospatial Spans scores were correlated in the backward but not the forward condition. The typical hearing group showed no correlation between the tasks. The findings suggest that early deafness leads to visuospatial but not tactile superiority in WM, specifically with respect to the storage component. More broadly, it appears that deafness-related compensation mechanisms in WM do not affect the other modalities in a uniform manner.