Acquired deafness: a multi-dimensional experience.

The aim of this study was to investigate the subjective experience of acquired deafness using quantitative (questionnaire) and qualitative (interview) methods. This paper presents findings from the questionnaire data. Eighty-seven people (of whom 38 had acquired a profound loss) participated in the study. The questionnaire contained items designed to examine both audiological and non-audiological aspects of deafened people's experiences. It also sought to measure the extent to which those aspects affect their quality of life. The questionnaire included three variables (i.e. reported frequency and impact of depression, and overall effect of deafness on one's life) as broad indicators of adjustment. Seventy-three respondents (including all but one of the profound group) completed the questionnaire. Factor analysis of the questionnaire data identified six major themes (with variance > 10%) underlying the personal experience of acquired deafness. Three themes--communicative deprivation, restriction, and malinteraction by hearing people--dealt with observable aspects of respondents' experience. Multiple regression found that these factor themes associated with biomedical variables. The remaining three themes dealt with less tangible aspects of the deafness experience. These themes--feelings of distress in interaction, feelings of abandonment and benefit from positive experiences--did not associate with biomedical variables. Finally, multiple regression indicates that respondents' factor scores predict the impact of deafness at least as strongly as their audiological and social characteristics.

Impossible objects and the things we do first in vision.

Interpreting an image involves postulating that it represents a structure drawn from some class C. Attention tends to focus on methods where C is large (e.g. 'rigid structures') or small (e.g. 'faces'). However scene analysis programs where C is intermediate have interesting properties. In particular it is often neither easy nor worthwhile to establish the full consequences of the postulates underlying analysis. The price of this incompleteness is that inconsistent interpretations are occasionally accepted. This parallels the psychological phenomenon of seeing 'Impossible Objects', so Impossible Objects may indicate that human vision too uses intermediate postulates and develops only a key subset of their implications. If this interpretation is correct, and demonstrations suggest that it is, then the particular pictures which cause us such problems should indicate what the relevant postulates are and to what level they are developed. Experiments and demonstrations suggest that the postulates concern angles between edges and that implications about edges' orientations, but not their depths, are automatically derived and checked. This makes sense ecologically and computationally. Ecologically, precise depth information would only help in cases involving improbable alignments. Computationally, a description of edge orientation paves the way to obtain various other types of information as required.