Keele Research Repository

Have you ever heard someone say that if you are born deaf, you have better vision to make up for it? People often think so, but is that actually true? We know that what babies hear, see, and touch determines how their brains develop. When you are growing, your brain is flexible. This means it changes depending on your experiences. Does this mean deafness changes how babies learn about things that they see? To explore this question, we tested two groups of babies to see how they processed visual information, meaning the objects that they saw. One group of babies was born deaf and the second group had normal hearing. We found that the deaf babies processed visual objects differently—even though the test had nothing to do with sound. This tells us that hearing loss in babies influences other senses, like vision. It also means that each sense affects how we learn about the world when we are still growing.