The Importance of Sound for Cognitive Sequencing Abilities

Sound is inherently a temporal and sequential signal. Experience with sound therefore may help bootstrap—that is, provide a kind of “scaffolding” for—the development of general cognitive abilities related to representing temporal or sequential patterns. Accordingly, the absence of sound early in development may result in disturbances to these sequencing skills. In support of this hypothesis, we present two types of findings. First, normal-hearing adults do best on sequencing tasks when the sense of hearing, rather than sight, can be used. Second, recent findings suggest that deaf children have disturbances on exactly these same kinds of tasks that involve learning and manipulation of serial-order information. We suggest that sound provides an “auditory scaffolding” for time and serial-order behavior, possibly mediated through neural connections between the temporal and frontal lobes of the brain. Under conditions of auditory deprivation, auditory scaffolding is absent, resulting in neural reorganization and a disturbance to cognitive sequencing abilities.

[1]  Christopher M. Conway,et al.  Nonverbal Cognition in Deaf Children Following Cochlear Implantation: Motor Sequencing Disturbances Mediate Language Delays , 2011, Developmental neuropsychology.

[2]  R. Thatcher,et al.  Cortical reorganization in deaf children. , 1990, Journal of clinical and experimental neuropsychology.

[3]  L. A. Jeffress,et al.  Cerebral Mechanisms in Behavior , 1953 .

[4]  P. Hauser,et al.  Development of Deaf and Hard-Of-Hearing Students’ Executive Function , 2008 .

[5]  Christopher M. Conway,et al.  Neurocognitive Basis of Implicit Learning of Sequential Structure and Its Relation to Language Processing , 2008, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences.

[6]  Christopher M. Conway,et al.  Contribution of implicit sequence learning to spoken language processing: some preliminary findings with hearing adults. , 2007, Journal of deaf studies and deaf education.

[7]  B. Waggoner.  Seeing and hearing , 2021, Karl Rahner’s Writings on Literature, Music and the Visual Arts.

[8]  Hanna Damasio,et al.  A morphometric analysis of auditory brain regions in congenitally deaf adults , 2003, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

[9]  F. Darley,et al.  Brain Mechanisms Underlying Speech and Language , 1967 .

[10]  Morten H. Christiansen,et al.  Please Scroll down for Article European Journal of Cognitive Psychology Seeing and Hearing in Space and Time: Effects of Modality and Presentation Rate on Implicit Statistical Learning , 2022 .

[11]  M. Marschark.  Intellectual functioning of deaf adults and children: Answers and questions , 2006 .

[12]  D B Pisoni,et al.  Cognitive Factors and Cochlear Implants: Some Thoughts on Perception, Learning, and Memory in Speech Perception , 2000, Ear and hearing.

[13]  Menachem Jona,et al.  Temporal coding in rhythm tasks revealed by modality effects , 1991, Memory & cognition.

[14]  Matthew W. G. Dye,et al.  Do deaf individuals see better? , 2006, Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

[15]  A M Bronstein,et al.  Evidence for a vestibular input contributing to dynamic head stabilization in man. , 1988, Acta oto-laryngologica.

[16]  Morten H. Christiansen,et al.  Modality-constrained statistical learning of tactile, visual, and auditory sequences. , 2005, Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition.

[17]  Lawrence D Rosenblum,et al.  Speech Perception as a Multimodal Phenomenon , 2008, Current directions in psychological science.

[18]  Marc Marschark,et al.  Deaf cognition : foundations and outcomes , 2008 .

[19]  K. Lashley.  The problem of serial order in behavior , 1951 .

[20]  Christopher M. Conway,et al.  Implicit sequence learning in deaf children with cochlear implants. , 2011, Developmental science.

[21]  Helmer R. Myklebust,et al.  A study of the visual perception of deaf children. , 1953, Acta oto-laryngologica. Supplementum.

[22]  G. Clark,et al.  Short-term auditory memory in children using cochlear implants and its relevance to receptive language. , 2002, Journal of speech, language, and hearing research : JSLHR.

[23]  G. Logan,et al.  Modality differences in short-term memory for rhythms , 2000, Memory & cognition.

[24]  M. Ullman.  Contributions of memory circuits to language: the declarative/procedural model , 2004, Cognition.

[25]  John O. Willis,et al.  NEPSY: A Developmental Neuropsychological Assessment , 2008 .

[26]  C. Penney.  Modality effects and the structure of short-term verbal memory , 1989, Memory & cognition.

[27]  J. Fuster.  The Prefrontal Cortex—An Update Time Is of the Essence , 2001, Neuron.