The Effect of Congenital Blindness on Color Cognition: An ERP Study

  • FENG Jie ,
  • XU Juan ,
  • LI Yalan ,
  • WU Xinchun
Expand
  • 1. Beijing Electronic Science and Technology Institute, Beijing 100070;
    2. Special Education College of Beijing Union University, Beijing 100075;
    3. Faculty of Psychology, Beijing Normal University, Beijing 100875;
    4. School of Applied Psychology, Beijing Normal University at Zhuhai, Zhuhai 519087

Received date: 2020-06-26

  Online published: 2022-05-20

Abstract

Are perception and cognition independent of each other? This study investigated the effect of congenital blindness on color cognition by comparing the behavioral responses and neurophysiological signal changes of congenitally blind participants and sighted participants. The results showed that the congenitally blind participants had certain color knowledge, but the level was lower than that of the sighted participants. Both groups had the N400 effect induced by color mismatch, and both showed left hemisphere dominance. However, the N400 effect of the blind group was greater than that of the sighted group, and the latency of N400 response in the blind group was shorter than that of the sighted group. These results suggest that direct visual experience is a sufficient but not a necessary condition for color cognition.

Cite this article

FENG Jie , XU Juan , LI Yalan , WU Xinchun . The Effect of Congenital Blindness on Color Cognition: An ERP Study[J]. Studies of Psychology and Behavior, 2022 , 20(3) : 289 -296 . DOI: 10.12139/j.1672-0628.2022.03.001

References

时琴琴. (2011). 盲童和正常儿童对颜色认知的对比(硕士学位论文). 上海师范大学.
张积家, 党玉晓, 章玉祉, 王惠萍, 罗观怀. (2008). 盲童心中的颜色概念及其组织. 心理学报, 40(4), 389–401
Barilari, M., de Heering, A., Crollen, V., Collignon, O., & Bottini, R. (2018). Is red heavier than yellow even for blind? i-Perception, 9(1), 2041669518759123, doi: 10.1177/2041669518759123.
Barsalou, L. W., Simmons, W. K., Barbey, A. K., & Wilson, C. D. (2003). Grounding conceptual knowledge in modality-specific systems. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 7(2), 84–91, doi: 10.1016/S1364-6613(02)00029-3.
Bedny, M., & Saxe, R. (2012). Insights into the origins of knowledge from the cognitive neuroscience of blindness. Cognitive Neuropsychology, 29(1?2), 56–84, doi: 10.1080/02643294.2012.713342.
Bottini, R., Ferraro, S., Nigri, A., Cuccarini, V., Bruzzone, M. G., & Collignon, O. (2020). Brain regions involved in conceptual retrieval in sighted and blind people. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 32(6), 1009–1025, doi: 10.1162/jocn_a_01538.
Connolly, A. C., Gleitman, L. R., & Thompson-Schill, S. L. (2007). Effect of congenital blindness on the semantic representation of some everyday concepts. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 104(20), 8241–8246, doi: 10.1073/pnas.0702812104.
Cutsforth, T. D. (1932). The unreality of words to the blind. Journal of Visual Impairment & Blindness, 25(5b), 86–89, doi: 10.1177/0145482X3200400504.
Kim, J. S., Elli, G. V., & Bedny, M. (2019). Knowledge of animal appearance among sighted and blind adults. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 116(23), 11213–11222, doi: 10.1073/pnas.1900952116.
Kutas, M., & Federmeier, K. D. (2011). Thirty years and counting: Finding meaning in the N400 component of the event-related brain potential (ERP). Annual Review of Psychology, 62, 621–647, doi: 10.1146/annurev.psych.093008.131123.
Kutas, M., & Iragui, V. (1998). The N400 in a semantic categorization task across 6 decades. Electroencephalography and Clinical Neurophysiology/Evoked Potentials Section, 108(5), 456–471, doi: 10.1016/S0168-5597(98)00023-9.
Kutas, M., & van Petten, C. (1988). Event-related brain potential studies of language. Advances in Psychophysiology, 3, 139–187.
Landau, B., & Gleitman, L. R. (2009). Language and experience: Evidence from the blind child (Vol. 8). Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Lau, E. F., Phillips, C., & Poeppel, D. (2008). A cortical network for semantics: (de) constructing the N400. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 9(12), 920–933, doi: 10.1038/nrn2532.
Leshinskaya, A., & Caramazza, A. (2016). For a cognitive neuroscience of concepts: Moving beyond the grounding issue. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 23(4), 991–1001, doi: 10.3758/s13423-015-0870-z.
Mahon, B. Z., & Caramazza, A. (2008). A critical look at the embodied cognition hypothesis and a new proposal for grounding conceptual content. Journal of Physiology-Paris, 102(1?3), 59–70, doi: 10.1016/j.jphysparis.2008.03.004.
Martin, A. (2016). GRAPES—Grounding representations in action, perception, and emotion systems: How object properties and categories are represented in the human brain. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 23(4), 979–990, doi: 10.3758/s13423-015-0842-3.
Rosel, J., Caballer, A., Jara, P., & Oliver, J. C. (2005). Verbalism in the narrative language of children who are blind and sighted. Journal of Visual Impairment & Blindness, 99(7), 413–425, doi: 10.1177/0145482X0509900704.
Saysani, A., Corballis, M. C., & Corballis, P. M. (2018). Colour envisioned: Concepts of colour in the blind and sighted. Visual Cognition, 26(5), 382–392, doi: 10.1080/13506285.2018.1465148.
Shallice, T. (1987). Impairments of semantic processing: Multiple dissociations. In M. Coltheart, G. Sartori, & R. L. Job (Eds.), The cognitive neuropsychology of language (pp. 111–128). Hove, United Kingdom: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Ltd.
Shepard, R. N., & Cooper, L. A. (1992). Representation of colors in the blind, color-blind, and normally sighted. Psychological Science, 3(2), 97–104, doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9280.1992.tb00006.x.
Simmons, W. K., Ramjee, V., Beauchamp, M. S., McRae, K., Martin, A., & Barsalou, L. W. (2007). A common neural substrate for perceiving and knowing about color. Neuropsychologia, 45(12), 2802–2810, doi: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2007.05.002.
Striem-Amit, E., Wang, X. Y., Bi, Y. C., & Caramazza, A. (2018). Neural representation of visual concepts in people born blind. Nature Communications, 9(1), 5250, doi: 10.1038/s41467-018-07574-3.
Wang, X. Y., Men, W. W., Gao, J. H., Caramazza, A., & Bi, Y. C. (2020). Two forms of knowledge representations in the human brain. Neuron, 107(2), 383–393, doi: 10.1016/j.neuron.2020.04.010.
Outlines

/

Copyright © Editorial office of Studies of Psychology and Behavior
Tel: 022-23540231, 23541213 E-mail: psybeh@126.com