Faster reaction times in the blind than sighted during bimodal divided attention

Parallel auditory and tactile discrimination performance of early blind adults and sighted control subjects was compared with each other in a bimodal divided-attention task. Stimulus blocks were composed of intermixed auditory and tactile stimuli. In each modality, infrequent, target stimuli differed from frequent, nontarget stimuli by location. The subject's task was to attend to both modalities simultaneously and to respond to both auditory and tactile targets. The blind had significantly shorter reaction times (RTs) to auditory targets than the sighted whereas the groups did not differ from each other in hit or false-alarm rates. The blind subjects' RTs to tactile targets were shorter than those of the sighted in light but did not differ significantly from the RTs of the sighted in dark. The results suggest that the blind are more effective in bimodal divided-attention performance than the sighted.