Previous studies have demonstrated that early deafness causes enhancements in peripheral visual attention. Here, we ask if this cross-modal plasticity of visual attention is accompanied by an increase in the number of objects that can be grasped at once. In a first experiment using an enumeration task, Deaf adult native signers and hearing nonsigners performed comparably, suggesting that deafness does not enhance the number of objects one can attend to simultaneously. In a second experiment using the Multiple Object Tracking task, Deaf adult native signers and hearing non-signers also performed comparably when required to monitor several, distinct, moving targets among moving distractors. The results of these experiments suggest that deafness does not significantly alter the ability to allocate attention to several objects at once. Thus, early deafness does not enhance all facets of visual attention, but rather its effects are quite specific. Introduction The loss of a sensory system early in development causes profound neural reorganization, and in particular an enhancement of the remaining modalities, a phenomenon also termed cross-modal plasticity One aspect of vision that has been reliably documented to be enhanced following auditory deprivation is peripheral visual processing, in particular during attentionally demanding tasks using moving stimuli. For example, deaf individuals exhibit a larger field of view than hearing controls when aske
