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In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section Visual Communication

Introduction, general overviews.

Visual Methodology
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Visual Culture
Iconography, Iconology, and Image Theories
Technology and the Image
Spectatorship, Vision, and Theories of Modernity
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Psychology and Visual Perception
Photographic Representation Theories
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Film Theories, the Gaze, and Visuality
Film Semiotics
Documentary
Histories of National Cinema, Genre, and Style
Information Graphics
Television and Video
Advertising
Journalism and Photojournalism
Political Communication
Visual Media Technology
Visual Rhetoric
Visual Literacy
Visual Representations of Social Groups

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Visual Communication by Michael Griffin , Kevin Barnhurst , Robert Craig LAST REVIEWED: 24 July 2013 LAST MODIFIED: 24 July 2013 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199756841-0034

The study of visual communication is inherently multidisciplinary, comprising the wide-reaching and voluminous literature of art history and the philosophy of art and aesthetics; the development and use of charts, diagrams, and cartography; the history and theory of graphic design and typography; the history and theory of photography, cinema, and television studies; the perceptual physiology and cognitive psychology of visual apprehension; the impact of new visual technologies (including digitization, multimedia, and virtual realities); the concepts and teaching of visual literacy; and the boundless social and cultural issues surrounding practices of visual representation. Such an eclectic and newly developing field has reached little consensus about canonical texts. Its boundaries remain indistinct. Even the concept of visual imagery is loose, aggregating everything from mental reproductions of perceptions in eidetic imagery, dreams, and memory to the physical creation of pictorial material. Images are the most obvious of the wide-ranging forms of visual communication, which extend beyond “pictures” or icons into realms of abstract symbols, indexical signals, designs, and ideas humans use to communicate experience. The following bibliography focuses on visual elements and images in communication media. It acknowledges literature from other disciplinary traditions that influenced the rise of visual studies, but centers primarily on the developing visual studies literature within communication as a discipline and field.

General overviews of visual representation and visual communication studies are available in encyclopedias of communication and in recent journals of communication and communication yearbook surveys. These include in the Oxford International Encyclopedia of Communications ( Summers 1989 ) and Blackwell International Encyclopedia of Communication ( Griffin 2008 ). Most of the reviews are products of the 2000s, as communication media scholarship came to acknowledge and incorporate visual analysis as a central component of media studies. Summers 1989 reviews the history of scholarly attention to the visual image, Griffin 2001 and Griffin 2008 attempt to trace the multidisciplinary roots of visual scholarship and the eventual convergence of work from the humanities and the social sciences in visual communication studies. Barnhurst, et al. 2004 contributes particularly on the emergence of academic and institutional networks supporting visual studies in communication and media studies departments and professional associations. Jewitt 2008 surveys associated theoretical developments and syntheses.

Barnhurst, Kevin G., Michael Vari, and Ígor Rodríguez. 2004. Mapping visual studies in communication. Journal of Communication 54.4: 616–644.

DOI: 10.1111/j.1460-2466.2004.tb02648.x

Charts the main currents and topical categories of the visual communication literature, correlating them with underlying institutional and organizational connections and loci. Assesses the coalescence and formation of visual studies as a disciplinary area within scholarly societies such as the International Communication Association.

Griffin, Michael. 2001. Camera as witness, image as sign: The study of visual communication in communication research. In Communication yearbook . Vol. 24. Edited by William B. Gudykunst, 433–463. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.

A historical review of the study of lens-based media representation and the multiple streams of theory and scholarship that have contributed to the emerging field of visual communication studies. Surveys contributions from film studies, the psychology of art and visual representation, semiotics, the anthropology and sociology of visual communication, and mass media studies.

Griffin, Michael. 2008. Visual communication. In International encyclopedia of communication . Vol. 11. Edited by Wolfgang Donsbach, 5304–5316. Oxford: Blackwell.

An overview of the multidisciplinary field of visual studies in communication, with attention to key interdisciplinary and theoretical cross-currents and issues. The entry focuses on the study of media and pictorial forms, still and moving, and the epistemological and political implications of mediated visual representations. Available online by subscription.

Jewitt, Carey. 2008. Visual representation. In International encyclopedia of communication . Vol. 11. Edited by Wolfgang Donsbach, 5319–5325. Oxford: Blackwell.

A brief summary of modernist and postmodernist approaches to the study of the visual that have increasingly conflated “looking,” “seeing,” and “knowing.” Highlights the role of cultural theories that connect visual representation with fundamental questions of reality, ideology and power, as well as procedures of signification and potentials for interpreting meaning. Available online by subscription.

Summers, David. 1989. Visual image. In International encyclopedia of communications . Vol. 4. Edited by Erik Barnouw, 294–305. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press.

An overview of scholarship on visual images prior to 1990, from ancient uses of images to European art history and the historical relationships between image and reality in pictorial representation. Attempts to specify the conceptual role of the picture plane in defining the visual image.

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Visual Communication and Learning

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Ann Marie Barry 2

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Brain-based visual learning ; Emotional and cognitive learning ; Imitative learning ; Media effects ; Social learning ; Visual cognition ; Visual mind

Visual communication may best be thought of as an umbrella concept. It is essentially a horizontal discipline that cuts across a number of separate fields of study and includes understandings based in cognitive neuroscience, art and visual representation, visual semiotics, visual rhetoric, mass communication, image and visualization, visual technologies, critical and cultural studies, and aesthetics. Because of this, crossover theories rather than area-specific theories provide a productive path of study to the discipline as a whole. Visual communication scholars, in fact, continue to debate exactly which areas should be included in any given program of visual communication study.

The idea of visual learning is also problematic. A lifelong developmental process, visual learning has often been seen as the province of...

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Barry, A.M. (2012). Visual Communication and Learning. In: Seel, N.M. (eds) Encyclopedia of the Sciences of Learning. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-1428-6_607

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Visual communication.

The study of visual communication comprises such wide-reaching and voluminous literatures as art history, the philosophy of art and aesthetics, semiotics, cinema studies, television and mass media studies, the history and theory of photography, the history and theory of graphic design and typography, the study of word–image relationships in literary, aesthetic, and rhetorical theory, the development and use of charts, diagrams, cartography and questions of geographic visualization (images of place and space), the physiology and psychology of visual perception, the impact of new visual technologies (including the impact of digitalization and the construction of “virtual realities”), growing concerns with the concept and/or acquisition of “visual literacy,” and the boundless social and cultural issues embedded in practices of visual representation.

Amid such an eclectic field no consensus has emerged regarding canonical texts. Even the concept of “imagery” itself seems to have no clear boundaries, encompassing concepts of the image that extend from the perceptual process, through the mental reproduction of perceptions in eidetic imagery, dreams, and memory, to the realms of abstract symbols and ideas by which we mentally map experience, and the physical creation of pictures and visual media. Consequently, the study of imagery is as integral to the study of language, cognition, psychoanalysis, and ethology as it is to the study of pictorial or graphic representation.

Social Relevance of the Field

This article notes key themes and theories in this cross-disciplinary area of study. For purposes of manageability the focus is on pictures rather than the broader concept of the visual , and with a bent toward the study of twentieth-century mass communication media rather than the larger history of art and visual representation. The term “picture” is used here in a sense that is similar to the Albertian definition of a picture noted by Alpers: “a framed surface or pane situated at a certain distance from a viewer who looks through it at a second or substitute world” (1983, xix). I do not, however, wish to limit my definition to a strictly Renaissance model of picture-making but rather would include all types of visual image-making that address viewers in a picture-like manner. The choice to concentrate on the pictorial directs the emphasis toward the production and interpretation of communication media and avoids the insurmountable problem of addressing a diffuse and boundless range of the visual. The focus on recent history reflects the concern for contemporary media and cultural environments that is such a prominent part of communication studies.

In this context the study of visual communication as an institutional interest area has grown primarily in response to perceived gaps in the more widely established field of mass communication research. The relationship to mass communication may not be readily apparent, for visual communication study did not emerge within established traditions of mass communication research, nor was it bound by the same theoretical or methodological paradigms. Yet the study of visual communication (as opposed to the study of art, art history, design, or architecture) has been defined in relation to the mechanical reproduction of imagery that has characterized modern mass media (Ivins 1953; Benjamin 1969; Berger 1972).

Those intrigued by the role and influence of visual imagery in mass circulation publications, television, and the entire range of commercial advertising have often been disappointed by the lack of attention given to pictures in established traditions of mass communication research. Prominent strains of mass communication research – public opinion and attitude research, social psychological studies of behavior and cognition, experimental studies of media exposure, marketing research, correlational studies of media effects, content analysis, studies of media uses and gratifications, agenda-setting research, or sociologies of media organizations and media production – have only sparsely and inconsistently incorporated the analysis of visual forms and their role in communication processes. For years content studies of television news were conducted solely from verbal transcripts, and audience studies often documented viewer responses to program stories and characters without attending to the nature of the specific visual presentations of those programs (Griffin 1992b).

Even studies of political communication , where one might expect a keen interest in the role of visual images, focus overwhelmingly on rhetorical strategies, issue framing, and a concern for the tactical effect of linguistic symbols and slogans, and lack a sustained attention to the contributions of the visual. A 1990 survey of political communication literature, for example, found that only five out of more than 600 articles and studies actually examined the concrete visual components of televised election coverage and advertising, and that when the term “image” was used it most often referred to conceptual interpretations of the public ethos of political candidates rather than specific concrete visual attributes of media presentations (Johnston 1990). Consciousness of the importance of visual images in political communication expanded greatly in the wake of the Reagan presidency, when such Reagan advisers as Michael Deaver averred that the control and manipulation of images overpowered anything that the public heard or read (Deaver 1987). Following the 1988 campaign, prominent political rhetoricians, such as Kathleen Hall Jamieson, began for the first time to explicitly call for the visual analysis of political spots and contemporary political discourse (Jamieson 1992).

Against this background the growing interest in visual communication throughout the 1970s and 1980s was often perceived as a corrective response. The increasingly ubiquitous visual appeals of advertising, both commercial and political, and the alarming number of hours most people spent watching television, had certainly made media researchers aware of the potential impact of images and triggered interest in some to include visual analysis in their work. Yet, few examples of research specifically focused on the visual mode could be found in the mass communication literature, and those hoping to pursue such research needed to look beyond the boundaries of communication scholarship for theories, templates, and inspiration.

Often, this meant foraging purposefully among literatures institutionally separated from communications: aesthetics, anthropology, art history, graphic design, electronic and video arts, film theory and history, the philosophy of perception and knowledge, literary theory, linguistics, semiology. Sometimes it meant opening the door to the developments within communications that were more attentive to the impact of images: to feminist scholars, and others, interested in gender portrayals; to those concerned with representations of homosexuality; and to those concerned with the stereotyping of various racial, cultural, and social groups. And sometimes it meant reframing or redefining entrenched areas of professional and technical training: in film and video production, photography and photojournalism, broadcast journalism, typography and publication design.

By the 1980s this trend led to movements within academic communication associations to provide expanded forums for visual communication research presentations. In the International Communication Association (ICA) nondivisional paper sessions were organized around visual communication themes, eventually leading to the establishment of a Visual Communication Interest Group. In the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) attempts were made to encourage the presentation of scholarly research in the Visual Communication Division, a division previously focused almost exclusively on professional training in graphic design and photojournalism, and seen largely as an area of technical support for the primary work of writing and editing. In the Speech Communication Association (SCA) in the US, an interest group on “visual literacy” was formed. These developments have continued to have a bearing on the place of visual communication studies within the larger field of communication research. However, primary sources of new theory and new research have continued to originate from outside these institutional parameters.

History and Theory

The rise of contemporary visual communication studies was, of course, preceded by centuries of thought and writing concerning the arts and the visual image. Yet the last decades of the twentieth century have seen a renewed philosophical concern with the visual that Mitchell (1994), following Rorty’s (1979) notion of “the linguistic turn,” has called “the pictorial turn.” In Picture theory (1994) Mitchell argues, “The simplest way to put this is to say that, in what is often characterized as an age of ‘spectacle’ (Debord), ‘surveillance’ (Foucault), and all-pervasive image-making, we still do not know exactly what pictures are, what their relation to language is, how they operate on observers and on the world, how their history is to be understood, and what is to be done with or about them” (1994, 13). He adds, “while the problem of pictorial representation has always been with us, it presses inescapably now, and with an unprecedented force, on every level of culture, from the most refined philosophical speculations to the most vulgar productions of the mass media” (1994, 16). In this, Mitchell echoes the challenge described by Worth in the early 1970s (Worth 1981). An extensive body of literature explores the ontology and epistemology of photography and the cinema , the foundations of contemporary lens-based media. Writings on photography since the middle of the nineteenth century have continually explored, and revisited, the nature of the photographic image as art vs science, pictorial expression vs mechanical record, trace vs transformation. Meanwhile, the practice of photography has been dogged by the ongoing contradictions between the craft of picturemaking and the status of photographs as “reflections of the real” (Sekula 1975; Brennen & Hardt 1999). Similarly, the extensive literature of film theory , going back at least to the treatises of Lindsay, Munsterberg, Arnheim, and Balazs, has struggled with the nature of cinema and its proper aesthetic and communicational development (Andrew 1976). A wellspring of analytic concepts regarding the composition and juxtaposition of images have been applied to sophisticated analyses of mise-en-scène (the construction of the shot) and montage (the structuring of sequences of shots through editing). The synthesis of realist theories of mise-en-scène, formalist theories of montage, and structural theories of narrative in the work of Jean Mitry (1963–1965), and the subsequent application of linguistically based semiotic theory to cinema by Christian Metz (1974) pushed film analysis into new territories of narrative and syntactical exegesis in the attempt to identify a “language of film.” We are still looking.

Film Studies

An important foundation for the development of visual communication studies, film theory comprises a body of concepts and tools borrowed from the study of art, psychology, sociology, language, and literature. Work in visual communication has often returned to these various sources for new applications to photography, design, electronic imaging, or virtual reality. A central theoretical parameter of debate has involved the distinction between formative and realist theories (Andrew 1976; 1984), but has also involved questions concerning the scope and centrality of narrative, an issue that has preoccupied the philosophy of representation across numerous fields.

Formative film theories treat cinematic presentations as wholly constructed visual expressions, or rhetoric, and seek to build schematic explanations for the semantic and syntactic capacity and operation of the medium. Realist theories argue that there is a natural relationship between life and image. They assert that photographic motion pictures inherently mirror everyday perception and moreover that the goal for filmmakers should be to employ that essential capacity to create the most realistic possible simulations of actual experience. All film students learn about the concepts of film art posited by early formalists such as Munsterberg, Arnheim, Kuleshov, Pudovkin, Eisenstein, and Balazs, and countered by realists such as Bazin and Kracauer. Many aspects of this theoretical opposition have re-emerged repeatedly as visual communication studies have come to encompass parallel issues in television, photojournalism, news, advertising, and most recently digital image creation and manipulation.

The heart of the matter, and arguably the central question of all visual communication study, is the precise status of the image as a copy or analogue . As Andrew writes of the work of Bazin and Mitry, “Bazin spent his life discussing the importance of the ‘snugness’ with which the filmic analogue fits the world, whereas Mitry has spent his life investigating the crucial differences which keep this asymptote forever distinct from the world it runs beside and so faithfully mirrors” (1976, 190). Historically, film and photographic theory and criticism were absorbed with these questions as they pertained to the properties of the image-text itself. As will be discussed at a later point, visual communication studies turned the question toward the manner in which images were utilized and interpreted by media production institutions and viewing audiences.

The key point here, to be revisited throughout this article, is that the study of pictures brought into even greater relief questions of reflection and construction in human representation. And although these issues are not confined to modern visual media, and perhaps are questions that cannot be asked of pictures as if they were a purely visual medium, somehow outside of intertextual contexts, they have become defining issues for visual communication study in an era of constant photographic reproduction when it is so often taken for granted that visual media technologically mimic reality. These issues relate as well to spatial and temporal constructs in literature and the earlier plastic arts, and were raised by writers at least as early as the eighteenth century (Mitchell 1986).

Various technical advances have seemed to provide an inexorable progression toward ever more convincing recreations of the “real world” and have consistently raised the ante on illusion and simulation. Yet film theory has persistently directed attention toward the processes of constructing visual representations, constantly reminding us of the inherent tension between the craft of picture-making and the perception of pictures as records. Against the commonsense assumptions so often made that visual media give us a window on the world with which to witness “reality,” film theory from the beginning has interrogated the ways in which such “windows” are created and structured to shape our view. Even in the practice of documentary film, theorists such as Nichols (1991) identify patterns or “modes” of representational strategy that make each documentary a formal and rhetorical articulation. Writers on still photography, perhaps ironically, followed the development of film theory in fully theorizing the ontology of the photograph, but in the last 50 years have also contributed an extensive literature on the relationship of photo images to their subjects.

The fact that film studies provided an important stock of conceptual tools for the study of pictorial communication of all types was not lost on communication scholars who hoped to better understand the growing prominence of visual mass media in late industrial society. British cultural studies also borrowed freely from film studies (much of it centered around the British Film Institute and its sponsored book and journal publications) and the resulting sensitivity to the culturally constructed nature of visual representation in much cultural studies work made it attractive to visual communication scholars in America. Writings on visual media by British and Australian cultural critics and scholars such as John Berger (1972); Raymond Williams (1974), Laura Mulvey (1989), Judith Williamson (1978), and John Fiske and John Hartley (1978) drew the attention of those tuned into what the British increasingly called “lens theory.”

The influence of this brand of cultural studies on the American scene fueled a nascent interest in semiotic analysis and the interpretation of media texts, and it was not a far leap to imagine the incorporation of visual analysis into studies of representation, meaning, and ideology. An early example of the incorporation of visual analysis in the study of representation and ideology is Stuart Hall’s essay “The determination of news photographs” (1973). In this essay he attempts to apply the cultural and ideological analysis derived from Birmingham Center studies of popular culture to news photographs in order to demonstrate how pictures enhance and frame the ideological positions of accompanying linguistic text. In the mid 1970s the Glasgow University Media Group (1976; 1980) carried out some of the first detailed visual analyses of television news footage in order to expose the ideological nature of BBC reporting on industrial labor disputes. Moreover, the fastgrowing popularity of cultural studies often helped to open up additional curricular space for addressing the nature of visual symbol systems and processes of meaning construction. A convergence of interest in the study of photographically mediated culture was building from several directions, including anthropology, sociology, and the psychology of art.

The Psychology of the Visual: Language and Image

The work of E. H. Gombrich serves to represent the essential themes of this tradition, although its roots lie in the earlier work of Panofsky (1991; 1st pub. 1924) and others. In his highly influential book Art and illusion (1960) Gombrich makes a powerful case for the conventionality of schemes for visual representation. With an art historian’s knowledge of the traditions of western art, and particularly the development of linear perspective, he argues that picture forms of all kinds are conventionally constructed according to learned schemata, not copied from nature. Building from the idea that perceptual gestalts are not necessarily innate but often learned (a concept fully developed in the perceptual research of R. L. Gregory [1970]), Gombrich argued that perceptions of visual representations in art operate by means of gestalts that are culturally based and that, in this sense, pictures are read on the basis of prior knowledge of cultural conventions.

Gombrich develops the metaphor of “reading images” in his article, “The visual image,” written for Scientific American (1972). Here he reiterates the ways in which images are intertwined within cultural systems of language and function and depend upon “code, caption, and context” for understanding. Pictures rarely stand alone, and rarely communicate unambiguously when they do. The mutual support of language and image facilitates memory and interpretation, making visual communication (as separate from artistic expression) possible. Without using the same structuralist paradigm or terminology, Gombrich comes very close to reproducing the semiological notions of icon, index, and symbol in his analysis. Most images seem to combine all three qualities of signification in some measure, although it is most often the iconic prevalence and/or limits of images that preoccupies scholars of the visual, the iconic being that which most clearly distinguishes visual signs from lexical, mathematical, musical, and socio-gestural (Gross 1974).

Although a substantial body of research by perceptual psychologists contradicts Gombrich’s suggestion that visual apprehension is culturally learned – providing evidence instead that many aspects of visual perception derive from a natural, hard-wired set of sensory, neurological, and perceptual processes – the impact of Gombrich’s analysis has still been enormous. His writings provide a strong case against the equation of art and communication, and help to lay a basis for the study of visual communication as distinct from the study of art. They also demonstrate the need to understand the history of art, and the various traditions of depiction and symbolization that have influenced visual practices, before we can hope to explain the role of visual communication in modern media systems.

Together with film theory, semiotics, the social history of art, and anthropological concerns with art and visual representation, the psychology of visual representation has contributed to an eclectic body of theory and research on which communications scholars began to draw for conceptualizing approaches to visual communication analysis.

Other strains in the history of art and aesthetics that have contributed much to contemporary thinking about visual communication include the social history of art and aesthetic theories regarding the relationship between pictures and language. The social history of art, particularly in the work of writers such as Michael Baxandall (1972) and Svetlana Alpers (1983), offers models for investigating relationships between the production of images and the social contexts of their sponsorship, use, and interpretation. Alpers has explored the relation between picture-making and description, from the ekphrastic tradition of the Sophists in which they used the subject matter of paintings as jumpingoff points for discursive monologues and storytelling, a model, she argues, for Vasari’s famous descriptions of Renaissance paintings (Alpers 1960), to the seventeenth-century tradition of Dutch painting, when northern European painters broke with the narrative tradition of Italian painting to create a new “descriptive pictorial mode.”

Baxandall’s (1972) study of painting and experience in fifteenth-century Italy provides an example of what reviewer Larry Gross (1974) called a historical “ethnography of visual communication,” demonstrating how patronage and contractual obligations, on the one hand, and viewer expectations and understandings of convention, on the other, combined to make of painting a currency of social communication. Becker’s Art worlds (1982) applies a similar approach to twentieth-century social worlds of artistic production with specific attention paid to painting and photography, among other arts. Gross’s On the margin of art worlds (1995) follows in this vein with a collection of studies explicitly devoted to the social definitions and boundaries that have emerged among worlds of visual art and communication.

Related to these extra-textual studies of visual communication practice and meaning is a long history of attention to the intertextual relationships between word and image . Whether in studies of the relationship between religious painting and scripture, pictures and narrative, or in attempts to pursue the study of iconology (the general field of images and their relation to discourse), the existence of pictures within larger multi-textual contexts has led to several rich traditions of scholarship (Panofsky 1939; Mitchell 1986; 1994). Here the dispersed boundaries of visual communication studies become especially apparent. Its coherence as a field diffuses into myriad strains of philosophy, literary theory, linguistics, cultural theory, art history, and media studies – the concerns with the subject/spectator (the look, the gaze, the glance, observation, surveillance, and visual pleasure) and with the interpreter/reader (decipherment, decoding, visual experience, “visual literacy,” or “visual culture”) running through numerous disciplines and theories.

The Sociology and Anthropology of Visual Communication

This tradition of research emerged in the 1960s and 1970s in the US largely in association with the work of Sol Worth, Jay Ruby, Richard Chalfen, Larry Gross, Howard S. Becker, and their students. It was carried forward by scholars particularly interested in the cultural codes and social contexts of image-making within particular communities, sub-cultures, and social groups. This movement was influenced by work in the psychology of art and representation, film theory, semiotics, and the social history of art. For example, attempts to assess and compare the types of psychological schemata suggested by Gombrich in image-making and image interpretation across different cultures suggested that processes of visual communication were not universal and needed to be explored within specific socio-cultural settings.

The anthropology of visual communication was also heavily influenced by new approaches to the study of linguistics, not only by structuralist tendencies and the semiological theories and methods that structural linguistics engendered, but in particular by the rise of sociolinguistics (Hymes 1964). Sociolinguists had begun to examine the differing uses of language across sub-cultures, social classes, and ethnic groups, and provided exemplars for the similar study of visual “languages” in varying social contexts. A key figure in adapting these influences to the study of visual communication was Sol Worth. The collection of his writings, Studying visual communication (1981), edited posthumously by his colleague and co-author Larry Gross, is perhaps the best starting point for those interested in gaining a sense of the origins of the field of visual communication research. “The central thread that runs through Worth’s research and writings is the question of how meaning is communicated through visual images” (Gross 1981).

This interest led to the landmark Navajo Filmmakers Project, in which Worth collaborated with anthropologist John Adair and graduate assistant Richard Chalfen to study film made not as records about Navajo culture, but as examples of Navajo culture, reflecting the value systems, coding patterns, and cognitive processes of the maker (Worth & Adair 1972). The Navajo films (now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York), and the published results of the project, were praised by such commentators as Margaret Mead as a “breakthrough in cross-cultural communications” (Mead 1977, 67).

The critique of documentary practice led Worth to propose “a shift from visual anthropology to the anthropology of visual communication” (1981) suggesting the need to abandon taken-for-granted assumptions about the capacity of film and photography to portray culture from the outside. Instead, he suggested, it would be better to study the forms and uses given to visual media by the members of different cultures and social groups themselves. Worth vigorously distinguished this work from traditional “visual anthropology,” much of which he considered naïve and unreflective in its reliance on photographic records about culture, and increasingly became identified with the alternative of studying all forms of visual communication as examples of culture, to be analyzed for the patterns of culture that they reveal.

Interdisciplinary Cross-Currents

Worth’s idea of an “anthropology of visual communication” dovetailed with the work of numerous students, colleagues, and scholars working along cognate trajectories, leaving a fruitful legacy. These included, among others: ground-breaking studies of family photography and home moviemaking (Chalfen 1987); explorations of the nature and limits of documentary representation (Ruby 2000); the study of pictorial perception, learning, and interpretation (Worth & Gross 1974; Messaris & Gross 1977); children’s socialization to visual forms (Griffin 1985); the nature of visual rhetoric and persuasion and questions of visual literacy (Messaris 1994; 1997); institutionalized standards and practices in picture-making and use; the study of social worlds of visual production and legitimization – from art to advertising, to news (Tuchman 1978; Rosenblum 1978; Schwartz & Griffin, 1987); and the ethics of visual representation (Gross et al. 1988; 2003).

It also led to the establishment of the first scholarly journal in the US devoted specifically to visual communication research, Studies in Visual Communication . The journal published contributions from a wide range of disciplinary sources, representing the new critical histories of photography, work on the visual languages of science and cartography, research on caricature and political cartoons, essays on public art, new interpretations of the documentary tradition in photography and film, and a greater emphasis on television and media events. The pioneering study Gender advertisements (1976) by Erving Goffman was first published as a special issue of Studies in Visual Communication , and for a time the journal provided impressive evidence that scholarly attention to visual imagery was growing across the social sciences and humanities. An attempt to extend this attention led directly to the organization of a Visual Communication Interest Group in the International Communication Association, which in 2004 became the Visual Communication Studies Division of the ICA.

By the 1980s traditional notions of visual media were being re-evaluated across programs of art, communications, and journalism. A few journalism schools attempted to recast their photojournalism and publication graphics tracks into more integrated and multidisciplinary visual communication curricula. Communication scholars increasingly pointed out that, given the pervasively visual nature of contemporary mass media, it was no longer tenable to study mass communication separately from visual communication (Griffin 1992a), and that even a medium such as the newspaper needs to be understood as an inherently visual phenomenon (Barnhurst 1994).

Key Issues and Current Trends

The key issues for visual communication in the new millennium are surprisingly similar to those of 30 years ago. The major difference is that greater attention is being paid to these issues within communications scholarship itself, and the application of these ideas is being made across an even greater diversity of media forms and technologies, including digital ones. Recent attempts to examine the state of visual research, and its application to new media, remind us that the kinds of questions asked by Sol Worth decades ago have not been settled (Manovich 2001; Elkins 2003). We are still exploring “how, and what kinds of things, pictures mean.” And “how the way that pictures mean differs from the way such things as ‘words’ or ‘languages’ mean” (Worth 1981, 162). Barthes wrote that photography, “by virtue of its absolutely analogical nature, seems to constitute a message without a code” (1977, 42–43). This quality not only lends itself to the proliferation of pseudo-events, and the ever new developments and consequences of virtual realities, but makes of images a kind of automatic evidence that is rarely questioned. Therefore, the ontological questions regarding the status of images as simulated reality blur together with epistemological questions concerning the validity of images as evidence.

These compounded theoretical issues continually re-emerge in nearly every area of visual communication studies. A great, but still largely unmet challenge for visual communication scholars is to scan, chart, and interrogate the various levels at which images seem to operate: as evidence in visual rhetoric, as simulated reality bolstering and legitimizing the presence and status of media operations themselves, as abstract symbols and textual indices, and as “stylistic excess” – the self-conscious performance of style (Caldwell 1995). Visual style itself, apart from content-related denotation, connotation, and allusion, can be a powerful index of culture – sub-cultures, professional cultures, political cultures, commercial fashion. Initial forays suggest that scrutinizing visual forms of simulated “reality” tell us a great deal about the nature of media rhetoric, the limits of veridical representation, and the self-conscious performance of style in entertainment, advertising, and news. These issues are perhaps more significant than ever for the processes of “remediation” that characterize “new” digital media and the emphases on “transparent immediacy” and “hypermediacy” that distinguish digital visualization (Bolter & Grusin 1999).

Visual communication research, more than anything else, has been a path into the examination of the specific forms of our increasingly visual media surround. In the early stages of mass communication research Lang & Lang reported on “The unique perspective of television and its effect” (1953). The heart of the study was their comparison of the televised coverage of Chicago’s MacArthur Day parade with the reported observations and experiences of informants on the scene, a comparison that found the representation of the parade on television, the “TV screen reality,” to be very different from, even contradictory of, the “reality” seen and experienced by those attending the event. They concluded that television’s need to create a coherent presentational structure from separate, fragmented, and often only indirectly related scenes and activities resulted in a “televisual perspective” or televisual form specific to the nature and workings of that medium. Visual communication research is often distinctive precisely for its attention to forms of representation, forms created by the intersection of aesthetic and pictorial traditions, shifting industrial uses of visual media, and evolving media technologies. To many it seemed that the movement toward visual communication studies in fact best fulfilled cultural studies pioneer Raymond Williams’s exhortation to focus attention on the forms and practices of media production and representation (Williams 1974).

This is not a return to a McLuhanesque essentialism regarding media technology. Rather it is a recognition (following Raymond Williams) that the historically and culturally specific forms of representation that have evolved in particular industrial and commercial systems inexorably shape and delimit the nature of media discourse. This is an issue of particular concern to visual communication researchers as we proceed into an era of increasingly convincing virtual realism on the one hand, and an increasingly systemic textualization of images in cyberspace on the other. More and more visual practices are moving away from the ideal that visual media can and should explore and reveal our social and natural environment and toward self-contained visual lexicons that reduce all visual elements to characters in digital texts. For both economic and technological reasons digital designers and television producers increasingly create “virtual worlds of excessive videographics” in place of the realist style of conventional production techniques (Caldwell 1995). It is as if we seek to follow French structuralist philosophy to its logical conclusion, taming the potential autonomy and power of images and making them subservient to structural linguistic interpretation (Jay 1993). It is not just what we can do with new digital technologies of manipulation but to what purposes we seek to use the production of images in a “post-photographic age.”

Finally, in that emerging condition often referred to as the “global media environment” visual images have become a new sort of transnational cultural currency. Not the “universal language” that promoters such as Eastman Kodak Company claimed for photography earlier in the century, but a currency of media control and power, indices of the predominant cultural visions of predominant media industries.

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SYSTEMATIC REVIEW article

Research of visual attention networks in deaf individuals: a systematic review.

1 Department of Psychology, University of Almería, Almería, Spain
2 CIBIS Research Center, University of Almería, Almería, Spain
3 Growing Brains, Washington, DC, United States

The impact of deafness on visual attention has been widely discussed in previous research. It has been noted that deficiencies and strengths of previous research can be attributed to temporal or spatial aspects of attention, as well as variations in development and clinical characteristics. Visual attention is categorized into three networks: orienting (exogenous and endogenous), alerting (phasic and tonic), and executive control. This study aims to contribute new neuroscientific evidence supporting this hypothesis. This paper presents a systematic review of the international literature from the past 15 years focused on visual attention in the deaf population. The final review included 24 articles. The function of the orienting network is found to be enhanced in deaf adults and children, primarily observed in native signers without cochlear implants, while endogenous orienting is observed only in the context of gaze cues in children, with no differences found in adults. Results regarding alerting and executive function vary depending on clinical characteristics and paradigms used. Implications for future research on visual attention in the deaf population are discussed.

1 Introduction

1.1 background.

Early auditory deprivation is recognized as a factor influencing the development of visual attention in deaf individuals ( Colmenero et al., 2004 ; Bavelier et al., 2006 ; Stevens and Neville, 2006 ). However, existing evidence on the nature of this effect is conflicting and, crucially for the present review, unclear concerning the temporal versus spatial distribution of visual attention. Historically, research on this topic has been centered on two seemingly opposing hypotheses: the deficiency hypothesis, positing that early profound deafness leads to visual attention deficits, and the enhancement hypothesis, suggesting compensatory changes to visual attention processes ( Dye and Bavelier, 2010 ).

According to the deficiency hypothesis , integrating information from different senses is essential for the normal development of attention functioning within each sensory modality. Consequently, the absence of auditory input results in underdeveloped selective attention capacities. For deaf individuals, the lack of audition impairs the development of multisensory integration, thereby impeding the typical development of visual attention skills. Put simply, while hearing people can selectively attend to a narrow visual field and still monitor the broader environment through sounds, deaf individuals must use vision to accomplish both specific tasks and monitor the broader environment ( Smith et al., 1998 ).

This view has been primarily supported by studies examining sustained visual attention or vigilance using the Continuous Performance Test or “CPT.” For example, using the Gordon Diagnostic System (GDS), a widely used CPT, the participant is presented with digits and must respond when a “1” is followed by a “9” for around 10 min ( Dye and Hauser, 2014 ). These studies have found consistent underperformance in CPTs among the deaf population, indicating that auditory input plays a role in organizing visual attention. These results are consistent with a deficit view of cross-modal reorganization stemming from early sensory deprivation ( Mitchell and Quittner, 1996 ; Smith et al., 1998 ; Quittner et al., 2004 ).

Although CPTs have been widely used to assess sustained visual attention, these tasks are sensitive to certain additional cognitive factors ( Parasnis et al., 2003 ). Specifically, CPTs require sustained attention and the ability to hold information about the target sequence in working memory, and performance is negatively affected by the inability to inhibit responses to non-target stimuli.

In contrast to the deficiency hypothesis, the enhancement hypothesis or compensation view is based on the common assumption that deficits in one sensory modality lead to heightened sensitivities in the remaining modalities ( Bavelier et al., 2006 ). In the case of early deafness, this perspective posits that the visual system is reorganized to compensate for the lack of auditory input. Consequently, visual skills assume the functional roles previously performed by audition in the typically developing child, such as monitoring the environment or discriminating temporally complex stimuli ( Bottari et al., 2014 ; Benetti et al., 2017 ; Bola et al., 2017 ; Seymour et al., 2017 ).

The enhancement or compensation hypothesis has primarily received support from studies measuring the allocation of attention across space. The results of these studies suggest that in deaf individuals, there is a spatial redistribution of visual attention toward the periphery, allowing them to better monitor their peripheral environment based on visual rather than auditory cues ( Loke and Song, 1991 ; Sladen et al., 2005 ). For example, deaf individuals can be faster than hearing controls in detecting the onset of peripheral visual targets ( Chen et al., 2006 ; Bottari et al., 2010 ; Codina et al., 2011 , 2017 ) or in discriminating the direction of visual motion with attention to peripheral locations ( Neville and Lawson, 1987 ; Bavelier et al., 2001 ).

This redistribution of visual attention can alter the trade-off in the responses of deaf people to the periphery versus the centre. Specifically, in situations where central and peripheral static stimuli compete for selective attention resources, deaf participants are more likely to orient visual attention toward peripheral than central locations ( Sladen et al., 2005 ; Chen et al., 2006 ). Consistent with these findings, Proksch and Bavelier (2002) observed that deaf individuals are more distracted by irrelevant peripheral information, whereas hearing individuals are more distracted by irrelevant central information. However, while deaf individuals have been shown to possess a field of view that extends further toward the periphery than hearing controls ( Sladen et al., 2005 ), no differences between deaf individuals and hearing controls have been documented when processing targets presented toward the centre of the visual field ( Neville and Lawson, 1987 ; Loke and Song, 1991 ).

In an initial review conducted by Tharpe et al. (2008) to examine evidence-based literature on visual attention and deafness, various paradigms were explored, including the CPT, the letter cancellation task, and conflict tasks. No conclusive evidence was found to support general enhancement or deficits in visual attention or enhanced fundamental visual sensory abilities ( Tharpe et al., 2002 ). Rather, the authors propose that the variability in performance across these paradigms could be explained by the extensive allocation of attentional resources across the visual field, driven by increased monitoring demands. This hypothesis explains why deaf individuals tend to show poorer performance on tasks requiring sustained attention to central stimuli over time compared to those involving the detection of peripheral stimuli. This idea has been supported by results found using a modified flanker paradigm incorporating several degrees of distance between distractor and target ( Sladen et al., 2005 ).

Functional brain studies have also revealed significant differences between deaf and hearing individuals that support the compensation view. These differences are related to alterations in the visual areas and the activation of visual and attention-related brain networks. For instance, Bavelier et al. (2001) found that the absence of auditory input and sign language use in the deaf population was associated with greater activation of visual cortex areas when processing peripheral and moving stimuli. Furthermore, Mayberry et al. (2011) reported that deaf individuals exhibited greater activation of visual and attention-related brain networks during peripheral visual tasks.

An area of the cortex that has been extensively studied in the context of deafness is the middle temporal (MT) or medial superior temporal (MST) area. MT/MST areas play a key role in detecting and analyzing movement and activity in these areas is modulated by attentional processes ( O’Craven et al., 1997 ). When observing unattended moving stimuli, both deaf and hearing participants show similar recruitment of the MT/MST cortex. However, when required to attend to peripheral movement and ignore concurrent central motion, enhanced recruitment of the MT/MST is observed in deaf individuals relative to hearing controls ( Bavelier et al., 2001 ; Fine et al., 2005 ). This pattern echoes a general trend in the literature, where the most significant population differences have been reported for motion stimuli in the visual periphery under conditions that engage selective attention, such as when the location or time of arrival of the stimulus is unknown or when the stimulus must be selected from distractors ( Bavelier et al., 2006 ). These findings suggest that deafness is associated with alterations in visual attention, resulting in changes in the recruitment of brain networks involved in the processing of visual information.

These apparently contradictory hypotheses highlight the necessity of organising previous research within a recognized model of attention. This review aims to respond to this need by systematically analysing the tasks employed to measure various aspects of attention in each study.

1.2 The integrative hypothesis

The contradictory results mentioned previously prompted an integrative review published by Dye and Bavelier (2010) . These authors proposed that while the deficiency hypothesis and enhancement hypothesis may appear to be mutually exclusive, the conflicting evidence concerning the impact of deafness on visual attention could arise from measuring different aspects of visual attention. Consequently, the deficit view is predominantly supported by studies focused on the allocation of attention over time, whereas the compensation view is backed by studies measuring the allocation of attention across space. Therefore, when considering different aspects of visual attention, a striking pattern of attentional enhancements and deficits emerges as a consequence of early deafness.

In addition, these two perspectives consider groups of different ages and backgrounds. Individuals in the deaf and hard of hearing population are quite diverse regarding their preferred mode of communication (sign language versus oral language), the age of acquisition of their native language, the hearing status of their parents, the aetiology of hearing loss (e.g., genetic, infection), and the implantation of cochlear implants [CI—a small electronic device that is surgically implanted into the inner ear to help provide a sense of sound to individuals with severe to profound hearing loss ( Wilson and Dorman, 2008 )]. Most of the research suggesting that deaf children have problems with visual attention has focused on deaf children learning spoken language, examining changes in sustained visual attention after restoration of auditory input through a CI ( Mitchell and Quittner, 1996 ; Smith et al., 1998 ; Quittner et al., 2004 ). In contrast, studies suggesting that the visual system compensates for the lack of auditory input by enhancing the monitoring of the peripheral visual field have primarily involved deaf adults. Specifically, these studies have focused on culturally deaf individuals born to Deaf parents, acquiring American Sign Language (ASL) as their first language and lacking CI. This group is compared to those who received oral speech therapy and have CI ( Bavelier et al., 2006 ; Dye et al., 2009 ).

Dye and Bavelier (2010) suggested that the deficiency and compensatory views were not necessarily contradictory but complementary in explaining the cross-modal reorganization of visual attention after early deafness. They propose an integrative view in which early auditory deprivation does not have an overall positive or negative impact on visual attention, but rather, selected aspects of visual attention are modified in various ways throughout the developmental trajectory.

However, this division of visual attention in temporal and spatial aspects is very broad, and the paradigms used to test these hypotheses have certain shortcomings. Studies examining the impact on temporal attention used measures from the Rapid Serial Visual Presentation Paradigms and the Attentional Blink; however, consistent results were not observed across different experiments ( Dye and Bavelier, 2010 ; Dye, 2014 ; Thakur et al., 2019 ). Concerning spatial attention, the Useful Field Of View (UFOV) task has been employed. However, this complex dual task requires following two instructions — to both detect and locate a target while ignoring several distractors. Consequently, working memory, inhibition, orienting, and divided attention can all be deployed in this task, giving rise to what is referred to as the task impurity problem ( Miyake et al., 2000 ).

1.3 The attention networks model

Understanding the potential deficits and enhancements in visual attention among deaf individuals requires recognizing that visual attention is not a unitary entity. From this perspective, based on behavioral and neuroscientific studies, Posner and colleagues have suggested a model that divides the human attentional system into three functionally and anatomically independent networks responsible for alerting, orienting, and executive attention ( Fan et al., 2002 , 2005 ; Posner and Rothbart, 2007 ; Petersen and Posner, 2012 ). As already mentioned, previous hypotheses suggest that various aspects of visual attention can be affected differently in deaf individuals due to compensatory changes. The attentional networks model offers a framework to measure these different changes by separating attention into several functions.

The alerting network is responsible for achieving and maintaining a state of elevated sensitivity to incoming information. Alertness can be further subdivided into tonic and phasic alertness (for a review, see Sturm and Willmes, 2001 ). Tonic alertness (also called vigilance or sustained attention) is a state of general wakefulness or vigilance and refers to the ability to sustain attention over a period of time. Phasic alertness is a more transient alert state, modulated by a warning that precedes a target stimulus and prepares the individual for a fast reaction. Performance within this network has been measured using tasks where the appearance of the target is preceded by an anticipatory alerting cue, provoking a phasic change in alertness. This transition involves a shift from a resting state to a prepared state, ready to detect and respond to an expected event ( Marrocco and Davidson, 1998 ; Beane and Marrocco, 2004 ). Tonic alertness, on the other hand, is typically evaluated through lengthy and repetitive tasks requiring participants to identify and respond to infrequently occurring targets, the most frequent example being CPTs ( Petersen and Posner, 2012 ).

The orienting network is responsible for the movement of attention throughout space, allowing the selection of specific information from numerous sensory inputs. In this regard, orienting can be reflexive ( exogenous ), such as when a sudden target event draws attention to its location, or it can be voluntary ( endogenous ), such as when a person searches the visual field looking for a target ( Jonides, 1981 ). Although overt orienting is often associated with head or eye movements toward the target, it can also enhance target processing by covertly orienting attention ( Posner, 1980 , 2016 ). Spatial orientation has traditionally been studied with tasks based on the “spatial orienting paradigm” or “cost and benefits paradigm.” In these tasks, the participants are presented with a fixation point and placeholders (the location where the target appears) at both sides of a fixation point. Following the onset of the fixation point, an attentional cue is presented, followed by the target to which participants must respond. Trials are categorized as cued/valid if the target appears at cued locations, uncued/invalid when it appears opposite to the cue, or neutral when the cue appears at the centre or both locations. In typical measures of exogenous orienting, a change occurs in the placeholder location to elicit an involuntary orienting response (such as the illumination of the locations). Conversely, in measures of endogenous orienting, a central cue is presented to prompt a voluntary orienting response toward a specific location or object ( Uncapher et al., 2011 ; Chica et al., 2014 ).

Finally, the executive attention network involves more complex mental operations to detect and resolve the conflict between expectation, stimulus, and response. While this network shares some overlap with executive functions, it specifically involves processes related to planning and executing goal-directed actions. However, executive functions are a more general domain that includes working memory, mental flexibility, conflict monitoring, and, in close association with executive attention, inhibitory control ( Botvinick et al., 2001 ; Matsumoto and Tanaka, 2004 ). Assessment of the executive attention network typically involves “resolution of conflict” paradigms, which require the suppression of either processing or responding to information that elicits incorrect or inappropriate responses ( Posner and DiGirolamo, 1998 ). Examples of such paradigms include the flanker ( Fan et al., 2002 ), Stroop ( Fan et al., 2003 ), or Simon tasks ( Simon and Craft, 1970 ).

One commonly used task specifically designed to measure most of these networks is the attention network test (ANT), which is based on two paradigms — the flanker task and the cost and benefits paradigm. The ANT enables the evaluation of three attentional networks in children and adults: phasic alerting, exogenous orienting, and executive attention ( Fan et al., 2002 ).

The main task is based on the flanker paradigm where the participant must press two keys indicating the direction (left or right) of a central arrow surrounded by congruent, incongruent, or neutral flankers. The difference in reaction times or accuracy between the congruent and incongruent conditions provides a measure of the executive attention network. The efficiency of the alerting network is examined by changes in performance resulting from a warning signal preceding the target, compared to trials without any previous cue. The efficiency of the orienting network is measured by comparing the performance benefits associated with a spatial cue predicting the location of the stimulus array (above or below fixation) with a central cue.

The integrative hypothesis proposed by Dye and Bavelier (2010) predicts that the strengths and weaknesses in visual attention resulting from early auditory deprivation are also linked to the abilities of orienting, alerting, and executive functions within the visual attention networks model developed by Petersen and Posner (2012) . Consequently, it is important to identify the tasks used to measure attention in deaf individuals and their possible interpretation according to the attention networks model. Understanding the weaknesses and strengths of visual attention networks related to early auditory deprivation aids in characterizing the developmental trajectory of these attentional functions during middle childhood (from 6 to 12 years old) since this is an important developmental stage for visual attention ( Rueda et al., 2004 ) and marks the beginning of formal schooling.

1.4 Objectives

To our knowledge, no systematic review has included evidence regarding the integrative hypothesis proposed by Dye and Bavelier (2010) . Furthermore, since the publication of the 2008 review by Tharpe and colleagues, no comprehensive review has been conducted to gather research findings enabling the identification of visual attention functions that could be diminished or enhanced in individuals with early auditory deprivation.

We conducted a systematic review of studies published between 2008 and 2023 focusing on deaf populations (from middle childhood through adulthood). The objective was to analyse investigations exploring one or more visual attention functions described in the attentional networks model. More specifically, our systematic review aims to:

1. Determine the most frequently studied functions of alerting, orienting, and executive attention in deaf individuals, along with the task paradigms employed to investigate such functions.

2. Identify the main strengths and impairments observed in the functioning of attentional networks in deaf adults and explore whether differences are found depending on the use of different communication systems, cochlear implants, and age of cochlear implant acquisition.

3. Examine the key developmental changes observed in the functioning of attention networks in deaf children during middle childhood (ages 6–12) and identify the main differences compared to typical hearing children of the same age.

2.1 Search strategy

We conducted a search on October 9th, 2023, of the peer-reviewed literature published in English between 2008 and 2023. The search was carried out on the Web of Science, Medline, Scielo, and Psycinfo databases, focusing on experimental studies of deaf populations aged 6–50 years. Using performance tasks to measure visual attention. The search utilized specific terms with relevant connectors to target visual attention measures and the population of interest. The search terms included: (deaf* OR “auditory deprivation” OR “hearing impairment”) AND (“orient*” OR “alert*” OR “spatial attention” OR “attention network” OR “visual selective attention” OR “visual attention” OR “sustained attention” OR “altered attention” OR “divided attention” OR “visuospatial attention” OR “executive attention”). Data extraction adhered to the recommendations provided by the Cochrane group ( Higgins and Green, 2011 ) and the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Review and Meta-Analyses protocol (PRISMA; Moher et al., 2009 ).

2.2 Selection criteria

We use the PICOS strategy to define inclusion criteria (Participants, Intervention, Comparisons, Results, and Studies). This review includes studies with the following characteristics: (P) participants without a psychiatric history and typical neurodevelopment with mild, severe, or profound bilateral deafness aged between 6 and 50 year; (I) measures of some of the specific functions of the attention networks, including alerting orienting and executive attention. No specific intervention is considered in this review; (C) Transversal studies comparing performance between the deaf and typical hearing population, studies that compare the deaf population across different clinical variables such as CI and system of communication, and longitudinal studies within the deaf population assessing the development of visual attention; (O) studies are included where at least some of the attention networks can be separately measured through performance-based tasks based on the previously mentioned paradigms; and (S) Single case studies, doctoral theses, conference presentations, and papers without peer review are excluded.

2.3 Data extraction and quality evaluation

The initial search yielded 2,603 articles. After excluding duplicates between databases, 1,349 articles were removed. After applying the exclusion criteria, the studies were filtered by title and abstract, resulting in 86 remaining papers by the first author. The full texts of these 86 articles were then read and analysed by all authors. Most articles were excluded due to the inclusion of populations with other deficits, non-performance-based measures, or tasks that measured other aspects of visual attention not included in the attention networks model. In total, 24 articles met our inclusion criteria in agreement with all authors (see Figure 1 ).

Figure 1 . Flow chart of the identification, screening, eligibility, and selection of studies.

Based on our research objective, the articles were classified according to the age of the participants: individuals aged 18 to 60 were categorized as adults, while those aged 6 to 12 were considered children. After some deliberation among the authors, studies involving participants up to 14 years old were included in the children category, along with a study by Kronenberger et al. (2013) which encompassed individuals aged 7–25 years. Significant statistical differences between deaf or hard of hearing and fully hearing individuals in measures assessing attention network efficiency were used as an indication of specific outcomes for each study.

The risk of bias was assessed for all articles using the Newcastle-Ottawa scale (NOS; Wells et al., 2021 , adapted from Herzog et al., 2013 ) to evaluate the quality of the studies. In this version, the quality scores were based on the selection of sample, comparability between groups, and the measurement of results. For cross-sectional studies, a maximum score of 10 can be obtained, with a score above 6 considered a satisfactory methodology score ( Orton et al., 2014 ). In this systematic review, none of the studies included in the final analysis scored <7 (see Table 1 ).

Table 1 . Risk of bias scores adapted from the Newcastle-Ottawa scale.

3.1 Frequency of studies and tasks used

The initial objective of the study was to determine the most frequently studied aspects of attention. Of the 24 included studies, 23 adopted a cross-sectional experimental design and one was a longitudinal study. Additionally, 15 studies focused solely on adult samples, eight studies exclusively involved children, and one study included both adult and child participants. Not all studies investigated a single attention network (see Table 2 ).

Table 2 . Studies included in the review by group of age sample and function measured.

3.1.1 The alerting network

The alerting network was studied in 8 of 24 articles. Among these studies, five exclusively involved children aged between 6 and 12 years, two studies focused on adults aged between 19 and 57, and one study used a mixed sample of adults and children aged between 7 and 25. Except for two of the 11 studies ( Daza and Phillips-Silver, 2013 ; Bharadwaj et al., 2020 ), the rest compared the deaf group with their hearing peers. Six of the 11 studied the tonic alerting network using CPTs, while one studied phasic alerting using the ANT (see Table 3 ).

Table 3 . Paradigms used in the studies included in the review.

As mentioned above, CPTs are frequently used to measure visual attention in deaf individuals. Depending on the paradigm used, several interpretations are possible regarding the specific function measured. Following the previously described example of the GDS, commission errors due to responding to “9” when no “1” appeared are considered impulsive, lack of response or omission errors are considered distraction/inattention, and the most commonly used “ d ’” combines commission and omission errors to obtain a measure of sensitivity and is considered to show vigilance, which is why it has been classified as a tonic alerting measure ( Baijot et al., 2013 ).

3.1.2 The orienting network

The orienting network was studied in 12 of the 24 articles. Only two studies focused on children, one involving a sample aged between 6 and 14 years and another involving both children and adults aged between 10 and 58. The majority of studies (seven out of 12) were conducted exclusively with adults aged between 18 and 57. In eight out of 12 articles, exogenous orienting was studied, using spatial orienting paradigms, including the ANT. Four articles investigated endogenous orienting using spatial orienting paradigms. A visual search paradigm designed by Heimler et al. (2015a) allows for obtaining a measure of exogenous and endogenous orienting and was included in both categories (see Table 3 ).

As mentioned previously, the orienting paradigms facilitate the measurement of exogenous and endogenous orienting by manipulating cues before the appearance of targets. These paradigms provide various measures of the orienting process, the most common being the facilitation of a valid cue toward the target. Additionally, they can be used to measure the disengagement of attention following an invalid cue. In cases where eye movements are considered, overt orienting of attention is measured instead of covert attention. Four of the nine studies focusing on exogenous attention with orienting paradigms measured saccadic eye movements (overt attention), while the remaining five used only manual responses (covert attention). Heimler et al. (2015a) designed a visual search paradigm in which participants must search for a target (tilted line) among a visual field full of similar distractors (straight lines) while ignoring a salient distractor (line tilted opposite direction). The salience of the target and distractor was manipulated trial by trial by changing their colors. This approach was driven by the idea that the salient stimulus attracts exogenous attention while the target requires an endogenous search across the visual field. Through this method, they were able to obtain a measure of endogenous orienting and exogenous orienting.

3.1.3 The executive attention network

The executive attention network was studied in 7 of 24 articles. Four studies involved a sample of children aged between 6 and 13 (see Figure 2 ), while three focused exclusively on adults aged between 18 and 58 (see Figure 3 ). Three of the 7 used conflict tasks with several modifications, three used the ANT, and the remainder employed the modified CPT developed by Dye and Hauser (2014) (see Table 3 ).

Figure 2 . Number of studies with deaf children in each attention network function and the general findings in comparison to full hearing children. *Deficits in executive attention found with younger children [2, 74].

Figure 3 . Number of studies with deaf adults in each attention network function and the general findings in comparison to full hearing adults. *Enhancements found in overt orienting but not in covert orienting and deficits with executive attention found only during specific conditions.

Regarding measures of executive attention, paradigms classified as conflict tasks were included. These tasks require participants to ignore distractors while attending to a central target. Notably, the study conducted by Dye and Hauser (2014) used a CPT but compared the execution of a CPT with and without distractors in the same sample, thereby measuring executive attention.

3.2 Comparisons between deaf and hearing adults

Our second objective was to compile the differences found between deaf and full hearing adults. We note that all studies involving adults employed a cross-sectional design (see Figure 2 ). The two studies that measured tonic alerting in deaf adults revealed poorer performance compared to hearing peers when using CPTs as a measure ( Kronenberger et al., 2013 ; Bharadwaj et al., 2020 ). Specifically, Kronenberger et al. (2013) used the Test of Variables of Attention (TOVA), indicating poorer performance by deaf individuals across all measures. Similarly, Bharadwaj et al. (2020) used the Integrated Visual and Auditory Continuous Performance Test (IVA plus CPT), demonstrating that deaf individuals commit more omission errors and have slower reaction times.

The only study that measured phasic alerting with alerting cues found an advantage in deaf adults ( Prasad et al., 2022 ). Deaf adults also seem to have advantages in covert exogenous orienting ( Xingjuan et al., 2011 ; Brazão et al., 2021 ; Li et al., 2022 ; Prasad et al., 2022 ). However, studies that measured overt attention with saccadic movement found no facilitation of exogenous orienting with this measure ( Bottari et al., 2012 ; Prasad et al., 2015 ; Heimler et al., 2015a ; Jayaraman et al., 2016 ). The five studies that measured endogenous orienting found no differences between deaf and full-hearing adults ( Bottari et al., 2008 ; Heimler et al., 2015a , b ; Bonmassar et al., 2021 ; Li et al., 2022 ).

Regarding executive attention, no differences were found between deaf adults and their hearing peers in a typical flanker task ( Holmer et al., 2020 ). Chen et al. (2010) used a paradigm with three conditions: congruency, the distance of the distractor (central or peripheral), and screen proximity (typical computer screen or projected onto a wall) and found that deaf adults showed greater interference from peripheral distractors compared to central cues. This effect was reversed when the display was projected onto a wall. Hauthal et al. (2012) designed a paradigm where participants had to discern the gender of a central target while faces appeared as distractors at the flanks. The faces could either match or differ in gender from the target, creating interference. The study revealed that with a high volume of distractors, adult deaf signers without CI still showed interference effects while hearing adults did not.

Regarding our secondary objective, to explore any differences observed among deaf individuals in relation to variables concerning hearing loss history, device use and mode of communication, very few studies examined adults with CI (see Table 4 ), possibly due to the relative novelty of the technology ( Wilson and Dorman, 2008 ). The few studies that included adults with CI did not find any effect of implantation in tonic alerting ( Kronenberger et al., 2013 ; Bharadwaj et al., 2020 ). The rest of the findings will be discussed below along with the results of studies in children.

Table 4 . Basic deaf related variables regarding auditory access and system of communication.

3.3 Development of attention networks and comparison between deaf and full hearing children

With respect to our third and final objective, we found one longitudinal study and four studies that either compared groups across different ages or treated age as a continuous independent variable. In deaf individuals, tonic alerting was observed to develop between 6 and 13 years of age ( Dye and Hauser, 2014 ; Dye and Terhune-Cotter, 2023 ). With exogenous orienting, the only result found was that the fundamental operations of moving and engaging develop from 6 to 7 years of age ( Daza and Phillips-Silver, 2013 ). Lastly, executive attention appears to develop around 8 years of age in deaf individuals ( Dye and Hauser, 2014 ). As mentioned before, comparisons between differences between individuals with and without CIs and different systems of communication were almost exclusive to studies with children. When comparing deaf and typical hearing children, greater challenges in tonic alertness were evident in speaking deaf children with CI ( Yucel and Derim, 2008 ; Hoffman et al., 2018 ), but not in deaf signers without CI ( Dye and Hauser, 2014 ). Regarding phasic alertness, Daza and Phillips-Silver (2013) found a greater alerting effect in the ANT when comparing oral deaf children with CI and deaf signers without CI. Daza and Phillips-Silver (2013) also found faster movement and engagement in a spatial orienting paradigm when comparing deaf signers without CI to oral deaf children with CI. However, in endogenous orienting, an advantage was found in deaf children (independent of the system of communication) when a social central cue was employed ( Pavani et al., 2019 ). When measuring executive attention with a flanker task, no differences were found between deaf children (mostly speaking with CI) and hearing children ( Daza and Phillips-Silver, 2013 ; Daza González et al., 2021 ) except for Merchán et al. (2022) who observed poorer performance in deaf children. Dye and Hauser (2014) , examining the effect of distractors on a central target with a focus on the difference in performance on two CPTs, found that deaf signers without CI showed poorer performance than their full hearing counterparts.

4 Discussion

4.1 current frequency of studies and tasks used.

As observed, there exist notable gaps in our understanding of the visual attention network in deaf individuals, with research focusing on different functions depending on the age of the participants. While tonic alerting has been extensively researched in both adult and youth deaf populations, primarily through CPTs, the exploration of phasic alerting remains scarce in both groups. Notably, only one study in adults has investigated phasic alerting, emerging as an unexpected result from a cost and benefit paradigm measuring orienting behavior ( Prasad et al., 2022 ).

Similarly, concerning the orienting network, while there is a wide range of research on exogenous orienting in deaf adults, few studies have tested these differences in deaf children ( Daza and Phillips-Silver, 2013 ). Moreover, endogenous attention has been underexplored in both age groups.

Regarding executive attention, there appears to be a more balanced interest across developmental stages, primarily through flanker tasks in children and a broader range of conflict tasks in deaf adults. This is likely due to the fact that flanker tasks have been previously studied in deaf adults prior to the scope of this review ( Sladen et al., 2005 ; Dye et al., 2009 ).

From these observations, it becomes evident that there is a critical need to delve deeper into the exploration of phasic alerting and endogenous orienting of attention, particularly in deaf and hard of hearing children. This need arises from the potential existence of adaptive developmental aspects in visual attention that warrant further investigation.

4.2 Results of comparisons between deaf and hearing adults

The results in deaf adults seem to indicate a deficit in the tonic alerting network, which can be explained by several hypotheses. One possibility is that deaf individuals have difficulties in sustaining attention over time, possibly due to a more rapid depletion of attentional resources. To test this hypothesis, investigating how performance changes over the course of a task could provide insights into whether there is a faster decline in performance or a general difficulty in executing the task. While Hoffman et al. (2018) attempted to analyse this aspect, they focused exclusively on children, which will be discussed below. Another hypothesis emerges from the division of labor perspective, which supports the deficit view. According to this notion, the observed results may be due to the need for deaf individuals to rely on vision to simultaneously monitor their environment and focus on a specific task. This dual demand on attentional resources might limit the resources available for performing visual tasks such as the CPT ( Smith et al., 1998 ; Quittner et al., 2004 ).

Normally, phasic alerting is primarily dependent on the auditory system. Therefore, in adults, it would be reasonable to expect that adaptive mechanisms could lead to a heightened state of alert generated by visual cues, as demonstrated in the experiment conducted by Prasad et al. (2022) .

The overall advantage observed in spatial exogenous orienting in deaf adults appears to be attributable to covert orienting rather than overt orienting/ eye movements ( Prasad et al., 2015 ; Brazão et al., 2021 ; Prasad et al., 2022 ). This supports the notion of an adaptive alteration in the visual attention system in deaf individuals. This adaptation enables them to monitor the environment since they are able to efficiently shift their attentional focus across the visual field towards important stimuli and also disengage from them more rapidly.

The mechanisms governing orienting of attention or eye movements have been shown to be more dependent on endogenous attention, which could explain why the differences between deaf and full hearing individuals do not extend to the results of these tasks ( Zangrossi et al., 2021 ; Celli et al., 2022 ). Endogenous orienting does not differ between deaf and typical hearing adults, whether measured by visual search ( Heimler et al., 2015a ) or spatial orienting paradigms using central cues ( Heimler et al., 2015b ; Bonmassar et al., 2021 ; Li et al., 2022 ). One explanation for this result is that endogenous orienting of attention requires voluntary control of attention (top-down), while exogenous attention is an involuntary mechanism (bottom-up), as some results indicated that deaf individuals could have worse executive control, possibly explaining the lack of differences in these tasks ( Li et al., 2022 ). However, as we have found in this review, deficits in executive control are not common in adults or native signers, contrary to the results found in orienting. Another possible explanation for this discrepancy is that this function does not show differences since it is not inherently adaptative. In contrast, the improvements observed in exogenous orienting could stem from the need to monitor environmental changes using only the visual system, without the support of the auditory system. On the other hand, attention shifts due to endogenous attention could be distracting for deaf individuals required to maintain a strong focus on hands and facial expressions during conversations.

Regarding executive function, no differences were found in a typical flanker task ( Holmer et al., 2020 ). However, when distractors were placed in the periphery instead of the centre, deaf individuals showed poorer performance compared to their hearing peers ( Chen et al., 2010 ). These contradictory results seem to support the hypothesis that the observed performance deficits in conflict tasks with central targets may not necessarily be due to deficits in executive attention. Instead, these findings could be due to the further allocation of attentional resources towards distractors in comparison to hearing individuals. This explanation is further supported when these results are compared to those of the UFOV tasks, where both targets and distractors are located in the periphery. In these tasks, deaf individuals tend to have an advantage ( Dye et al., 2016 ; Samar and Berger, 2017 ). However, the findings of Hauthal et al. (2012) could indicate an adaptive change specifically in the processing of faces. These results suggest that the performance of signers without CI in executive attention tasks depends on the position of the target, which can be explained by the further allocation of attention towards the periphery. An alternative interpretation of these findings is that deaf adults may develop an advantage in the ventral attention network (VAN). The VAN is responsible for reflexive bottom-up attentional mechanisms and has been associated with exogenous orienting and phasic alerting This could potentially explain the observed benefits in both functions among deaf adults. In contrast, the dorsal attention network (DAN) governs voluntary or top-down attentional mechanisms and has been linked to endogenous orienting, tonic alerting, and executive functioning ( Corbetta and Shulman, 2002 ; Rueda et al., 2023 ). Apart from tonic alerting, it appears that deaf adults may not experience performance deficits relative to typical hearing controls in this pathway.

4.3 Findings of comparisons between deaf and hearing children

In children, the differences between deaf and typical hearing individuals vary according to age, suggesting that middle childhood is an important period of development for visual attention. Our review found that deaf children show worse scores in CPTs, which is argued as being indicative of a deficit in tonic alerting. However, contrary to this notion, Hoffman et al. (2018) found no differences in performance block by block between deaf and hearing children. This suggests that tonic alerting or vigilance may not be affected, but the difference in performance is due to the division of labor, as mentioned previously. Furthermore, the poor performance during these tasks was characterized by high commission errors ( Yucel and Derim, 2008 ; Hoffman et al., 2018 ), which could be interpreted as poor inhibition or impulsivity. These findings have been replicated with other paradigms that measure response inhibition, such as the Go/No Go or Simon tasks ( Figueras et al., 2008 ; Botting et al., 2017 ; Hall et al., 2018 ).

The results reported by Daza and Phillips-Silver (2013) , indicating higher phasic alerting and faster exogenous orienting, could potentially suggest a benefit due to the lack of auditory stimulation. However, these results have not been directly compared with those of hearing children. We must also consider that the differences in endogenous attention found by Pavani et al. (2019) can only be interpreted in the context of gaze cues, since there is evidence that other (non-gaze) directional cues rely on different processes ( Heimler et al., 2015b ). Consequently, there is insufficient experimental data on orienting in deaf children in comparison to their hearing counterparts, which prevents us from drawing any firm conclusions in this regard.

Concerning executive attention, discrepancies between the results of Dye and Hauser (2014) and Merchán et al. (2022) and those of Daza González et al. (2021) could be due to differences in the sample, specifically in terms of age, since the latter study focused on children aged 9 to 10 years. As observed in adults, deaf children show no difference in UFOV task performance between the ages of 7 and 10 years. In fact, their performance surpasses that of their hearing peers between the ages of 11 and 17 ( Dye et al., 2009 ; Dye and Bavelier, 2010 ). This discrepancy in performance might manifest as a reduced ability to ignore distractors when they are at the periphery and the target is in the centre of the visual field. Notably, this difference disappears when the target is also positioned in the periphery, supporting the hypothesis that attentional resources are allocated toward the periphery.

In general, we can conclude that, as expected, the findings have revealed improved performance of deaf individuals in tasks related to covert exogenous orienting, with limited impact on endogenous orienting in adults. However, deaf individuals show poorer execution of tasks involving tonic alertness and executive attention, except when the target is presented peripherally. These results are consistent with much of the clinical literature in deaf individuals ( Barker et al., 2009 ) and support the integrative hypothesis suggesting a deficiency in the temporal distribution of attention and an enhancement in spatial distribution ( Dye and Bavelier, 2010 ). Finally, from the perspective of the attention network model, our study highlights the need to further explore phasic alerting. Currently, there is a gap in research exploring differences in exogenous and endogenous orienting between deaf and full hearing children and a lack of studies investigating the endogenous orienting network in deaf adults.

4.4 Development of attention network functions in deaf children

Regarding our objective of characterizing the development of attentional networks in middle childhood within the deaf population, several conclusions can be drawn. However, we must consider the need for further research in this area, particularly through longitudinal studies.

Our findings indicate that tonic alertness continues to develop from ages 6 to 13 in both deaf and typical hearing children ( Dye and Hauser, 2014 ; Dye and Terhune-Cotter, 2023 ). This aligns with previous research on typical hearing children using the same task, which showed a specific development ceiling at 10 years old ( Betts et al., 2006 ). However, it appears that deaf individuals do not reach the levels observed in typical hearing adults, at least those who are not native signers ( Bharadwaj et al., 2020 ).

The elemental operations of moving and engaging improve between the ages of 6 and 7 in deaf children ( Daza and Phillips-Silver, 2013 ). In comparison to hearing children, our results suggest that orienting networks continue to develop during middle childhood in deaf individuals, whereas in their hearing counterparts, this development tends to plateau at around 6 years old ( Rueda et al., 2004 ; Pozuelos et al., 2014 ; Federico et al., 2017 ). Notably, this development in deaf individuals appears to extend into adulthood, providing them with an advantage over typical hearing adults. Interestingly, when measuring electrophysiological brain activity through evoked potentials, improvements in visual attention related to saliency processing and orienting of attention have been observed as early as 3 years of age. These measures demonstrate improvement during the early years in deaf children, indicating early and differential development of these components of attention ( Campbell and Sharma, 2016 ; de Schonen et al., 2018 ; Gabr et al., 2022 ; Corina et al., 2024 ).

Finally, executive attention seems to improve between 7 and 9 years of age in deaf children. Dye and Hauser (2014) found that deaf signers without CI reach the same levels of performance between 9 and 13 years old. However, Daza González et al. (2021) found no differences among children aged 9–10, while Merchán et al. (2022) observed worse performance in a sample of 7–10 years old. These findings are consistent with those reported in studies of typical hearing children, suggesting that difficulties found in this aspect of the attention network cannot be solely attributed to late development ( Rueda et al., 2004 ; Pozuelos et al., 2014 ; Federico et al., 2017 ). When comparing deaf and hearing adults, it is plausible that deaf individuals continue to show development in exogenous orienting during early childhood, eventually achieving better performance than their hearing counterparts ( Bottari et al., 2012 ; Prasad et al., 2015 ). In adulthood, deaf signers without CI reach similar levels in executive attention when central targets are present ( Chen et al., 2010 ; Holmer et al., 2020 ). However, differences in tonic alertness may persist into adulthood ( Parasnis et al., 2003 ; Kronenberger et al., 2013 ).

4.5 Effects of the communication system and the use of cochlear implants

In most studies, the use of sign language is associated with the absence of a CI. It is important to recognize the clear distinction between culturally deaf people who communicate mainly in sign language within deaf communities and those who have received CI along with speech therapy. The latter group has experienced some level of auditory input and uses a language that is less reliant on visual cues.

In adults, there are no studies on tonic alertness involving deaf signers without CI. However, age at CI implantation does not seem to have an impact on CPT performance ( Kronenberger et al., 2013 ; Bharadwaj et al., 2020 ). While no differences were observed between deaf signers without CI and full hearing children ( Dye and Hauser, 2014 ), differences have been found in oral-speaking deaf children with CI ( Yucel and Derim, 2008 ; Hoffman et al., 2018 ). Additionally, Daza and Phillips-Silver (2013) found differences in tonic alertness between oral speaking deaf children with CI and deaf signers without CI in favor of the former. Dye and Terhune-Cotter (2023) found that while the English language was a strong predictor of better sustained attention, ASL proficiency was a more accurate predictor of response inhibition.

Generally speaking, these findings suggest a consistent trend toward poorer performance on tonic alerting tasks in oral speaking deaf individuals. Notably, the lack of an effect of age of implantation in adults raises the possibility that early language acquisition does not influence these outcomes. Regarding exogenous orienting, it is evident that elementary operations of orienting such as moving and engaging are enhanced in deaf signers without CI compared to oral speaking deaf individuals with CI ( Daza and Phillips-Silver, 2013 ). Additionally, the advantage observed in executive attention towards peripheral targets in adults appears to be more prevalent among deaf signers without CI ( Samar and Berger, 2017 ), while in children these improvements have also been found in deaf signers without CI ( Dye et al., 2009 ).

These findings align with the main hypothesis put forward to explain differences in performance on tasks that measure different executive functions in deaf people and could also be applied to these results, that is, worse performance can be attributed to late acquisition of language ( Hall et al., 2017 , 2018 ; Merchán et al., 2022 ). This explanation has commonly been invoked when attempting to explain performance on executive function tasks, but as observed in this review, tonic alertness also appears to be affected. However, an adaptive form of development is evident when executive attention is directed toward the periphery in deaf signers without CI who lack auditory stimulation and have delayed acquisition of language ( Dye et al., 2009 ; Samar and Berger, 2017 ). Unfortunately, there is insufficient evidence to conclusively establish the impact of these variables on phasic alertness, endogenous orienting, and executive attention.

5 Conclusion

In summary, there are notable gaps in the literature regarding the functions of visual attention networks, specifically in the alerting network functions in adults, phasic alerting, and both orienting networks in children. Current evidence suggests that deaf adults show poorer performance during CPTs, but this might not necessarily be attributed to deficits in tonic alerting. Phasic alerting, on the other hand, appears to confer advantages in deaf adults. Exogenous orienting shows enhancements, whereas endogenous orienting does not. Additionally, differences in executive attention are evident, particularly depending on the peripheral placement of the distractors. In children, the evidence reveals similar patterns of results, with the exception that difficulties in executive attention are observed before the ages of 9 or 10.

Regarding individual differences in language delay and the use of CI, it seems that benefits in exogenous orienting are more frequent in deaf individuals without CI and users of sign language while language abilities appear to be a good predictor of difficulties in executive attention. This understanding contributes to the growing body of knowledge in the field, emphasizing the need for further research to bridge the identified gaps and refine our comprehension of the intricate development of visual attention networks in the deaf population.

Data availability statement

The original contributions presented in the study are included in the article/supplementary material, further inquiries can be directed to the corresponding author.

Author contributions

NG: Writing – original draft, Methodology, Investigation. JP-S: Supervision, Conceptualization, Writing – review & editing. MD: Writing – original draft, Supervision, Writing – review & editing, Funding acquisition, Conceptualization.

The author(s) declare financial support was received for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. This research was supported by a grant PID2019-111454RB-I00/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 from Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation—Spanish State Research Agency, to the last author.

Conflict of interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Publisher’s note

All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

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Keywords: deaf, children, attention, hearing, orienting, review methodology, investigation

Citation: Gioiosa Maurno N, Phillips-Silver J and Daza González MT (2024) Research of visual attention networks in deaf individuals: a systematic review. Front. Psychol . 15:1369941. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1369941

Received: 13 January 2024; Accepted: 22 April 2024; Published: 09 May 2024.

Reviewed by:

Copyright © 2024 Gioiosa Maurno, Phillips-Silver and Daza González. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) . The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

*Correspondence: María Teresa Daza González, [email protected]

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Edited by Wolfgang Donsbach, 5304-5316. Oxford: Blackwell. An overview of the multidisciplinary field of visual studies in communication, with attention to key interdisciplinary and theoretical cross-currents and issues. The entry focuses on the study of media and pictorial forms, still and moving, and the epistemological and political ...
PDF Visual Communication Theory and Research
The keys to successful visual communication research lie in two broad areas: A rigorous methodology and a compelling theoretical framework. Subsequent chapters will detail research methods utilized in visual communication. Briefly, social science methods of survey, content
Visual Communication Theory and Research
"Visual communication research is influenced by so many disciplines - psychology, sociology, cognitive science, history and others - that it has been challenging for students to get a broad, comprehensive overview. Visual Communication Theory and Research provides easy access to the topic by categorization according to one of the communication ...
Journal of Visual Communication and Image Representation
The Journal of Visual Communication and Image Representation publishes papers on state-of-the-art visual communication and image representation, with emphasis on novel technologies and theoretical work in this multidisciplinary area of pure and applied research. The field of visual communication and image representation is considered in its broadest sense and covers both digital and analog ...
Visual Communication and Learning
Visual communication may best be thought of as an umbrella concept. It is essentially a horizontal discipline that cuts across a number of separate fields of study and includes understandings based in cognitive neuroscience, art and visual representation, visual semiotics, visual rhetoric, mass communication, image and visualization, visual technologies, critical and cultural studies, and ...
Handbook of Visual Communication
This Handbook of Visual Communication explores the key theoretical areas in visual communication, and presents the research methods utilized in exploring how people see and how visual communication occurs. With chapters contributed by many of the best-known and respected scholars in visual communication, this volume brings together significant and influential work in the visual communication ...
Handbook of Visual Communication
This Handbook of Visual Communication explores the key theoretical areas and research methods of visual communication. With chapters contributed by many of the best-known and respected scholars in visual communication, this volume brings together significant and influential work in the discipline. The second edition of this already-classic text ...
Learning through mess: Sensemaking visual communication practices in a
Introduction. Visual communication and visual methods in research have grown in popularity in recent decades (see Barnhurst et al., 2004).For some, they offer the potential to engage and involve audiences, and others hope that visual communication can bridge communication difficulties, especially when diverse groups of researchers and the public work together (Goransson and Fagerholm, 2018).
Visual Communication Research Designs
Visual Communication Research Designs provides a step-by-step guide for designing research involving visuals relevant to communications media. This volume explains the process from conceptualization to research questions, instrumentation, analysis, and reliability and validity checks. It also addresses the lack of sufficient methods to answer ...
(PDF) Visual communication in research: a third space between science
The environments and the languages to be used are the ones made available by the Web and by the digital world that is constitution-ally graphic-visual; communication of scientific research can ...
PDF An overview of research methods in visual communication design education
1 An overview of research methods 2 in visual communication design education. 3 The article presents a review of studies done on research in visual 4 communication design education. It examines the use of research in 5 postgraduate and undergraduate programmes, and evaluates the debate over 6 research methods applicable to the field. The article includes an overview of
Visual Communication
Visual communication research, more than anything else, has been a path into the examination of the specific forms of our increasingly visual media surround. In the early stages of mass communication research Lang & Lang reported on "The unique perspective of television and its effect" (1953). The heart of the study was their comparison of ...
An overview of research methods in visual communication design
The article presents a review of studies done on research in visual communication design education. According to reviews, the design practice in visual communication design education has shifted from an emphasis on training in traditional vocational courses to a focus on research being integral to the course; this prompted this article to ...
Visual communication in research: a third space between ...
Ample scientific literature recognises the role of visual thinking in the constructive process of ideas and mental images and the function of visual intelligence in the communicative processes. Starting from the sectoral studies, we have turned our attention to the visual communication of the results of scientific research, relating it to some characteristics of artistic communication to find ...
(PDF) Visual Communication Theory and Research: A Mass Communication
Visual Communication Theory and Research: A Mass Communication Perspective. April 2014. Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan, New York. Authors: Shahira S. Fahmy. The American University in Cairo. Mary ...
(PDF) An overview of research methods in visual communication design
research methods applicable to the field. The article includ es an overview of. 6. commonly-used methods for visual comm unication design education such as. 7. Action Research and Reflective ...
Insights in Visual Communication: 2022
The goal of this special edition Research Topic is to shed light on the progress made in the past decade in the visual communication field and on its future challenges to provide a thorough overview of the state of the art of the visual communication field. This article collection will inspire, inform, and provide direction and guidance to ...
The Pitfalls of Visual Representations:
To survey the current state of research on the pitfalls of visualization, we have analyzed 51 articles published in peer-reviewed journals and books in 6 main fields of research related to visual representations: (a) statistical graphic representations, (b) visual literacy and visual communication, (c) information visualization and human ...
Exploring visual communication in corporate sustainability reporting
He identified four types of visual rhetoric and repetition: identity, similarity, accumulation, and continuity. Davison's research demonstrated how visual rhetoric in annual reports contributes to the communication of intellectual capital. Corporate images play a pivotal role in presenting a company's values and operations.
Frontiers
1 Department of Psychology, University of Almería, Almería, Spain; 2 CIBIS Research Center, University of Almería, Almería, Spain; 3 Growing Brains, Washington, DC, United States; The impact of deafness on visual attention has been widely discussed in previous research. It has been noted that deficiencies and strengths of previous research can be attributed to temporal or spatial aspects ...
Massasoit Commonwealth Honors Students Display Research Projects
On Friday, April 26, students in the Commonwealth Honors program presented a visual display of their semester long research to the college community and the public at the Spring 2024 Honors Conference in the The Grove at the Massasoit Brockton Campus Library. Colleen Cesario Faculty: Mare Ambrose Division of Humanities and Communication Arts The Morality

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Visual Communication by Michael Griffin , Kevin Barnhurst , Robert Craig LAST REVIEWED: 24 July 2013 LAST MODIFIED: 24 July 2013 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199756841-0034

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Social Relevance of the Field

History and Theory

Film Studies

The Psychology of the Visual: Language and Image

The Sociology and Anthropology of Visual Communication

Interdisciplinary Cross-Currents

Key Issues and Current Trends

SYSTEMATIC REVIEW article

1 Introduction

1.2 The integrative hypothesis

1.3 The attention networks model

1.4 Objectives

2.1 Search strategy

2.2 Selection criteria

2.3 Data extraction and quality evaluation

3.1 Frequency of studies and tasks used

3.1.1 The alerting network

3.1.2 The orienting network

3.1.3 The executive attention network

3.2 Comparisons between deaf and hearing adults

3.3 Development of attention networks and comparison between deaf and full hearing children

4 Discussion

4.2 Results of comparisons between deaf and hearing adults

4.3 Findings of comparisons between deaf and hearing children

4.4 Development of attention network functions in deaf children

4.5 Effects of the communication system and the use of cochlear implants

5 Conclusion

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