1 3 Exp Brain Res (2016) 234:627–636 DOI 10.1007/s00221-015-4488-1 RESEARCH ARTICLE Deaf, blind or deaf-blind: Is touch enhanced? Costanza Papagno 1,2 · Carlo Cecchetto 1 · Alberto Pisoni 1,2 · Nadia Bolognini 1,2,3 Received: 5 July 2015 / Accepted: 29 October 2015 / Published online: 16 November 2015 © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2015 Introduction When someone looses one type of sensory input, s/he may compensate by using the sensory information from other senses. However, loss of one type of sensory information, at specific developmental times, may lead to generalized deficits. We are endowed with distinct sensory systems, specific for each sensory modality, connected with spe- cialized brain regions. The fact that we are provided with distinct sensory channels allows us experiencing uni- modal, modality-specific, sensations, allowing a parallel processing of different sensations that will then be unified in a multimodal percept (Neville and Bavelier 2002). This multisensory integration is made possible by extensive and dynamic neural interactions, which in turn are highly influenced by our own experiences and developmental con- straints (Calvert and Thesen 2004). Given our multisensory representation of reality, we could expect that the loss of one sense must lead to a func- tional loss. In this perspective, it is plausible that losing or lacking a sensory modality alters the capacities of pro- cessing, understanding or interacting, with the world, and leads to functional and, perhaps structural, plastic changes in the brain. On the other hand, the lack or loss of a sen- sory modality may lead to a compensatory enhancement of other senses, resulting even in functional gains and com- pensations through cross-modal plasticity, namely the re- organization of deprived and spared sensory networks (e.g. Merabet and Pascual-Leone 2010; Bolognini et al. 2013; Heimler et al. 2014). Blind participants exhibit superior performance as com- pared to sighted individuals in a series of auditory tasks. For example, they have a better accuracy for auditory pitch discrimination and pitch–timbre categorization (Wan et al. 2010), as well as for olfaction (Cuevas et al. 2009) when Abstract When someone looses one type of sensory input, s/he may compensate by using the sensory informa- tion conveyed by other senses. To verify whether loosing a sense or two has consequences on a spared sensory modal- ity, namely touch, and whether these consequences depend on the type of sensory loss, we investigated the effects of deafness and blindness on temporal and spatial tactile tasks in deaf, blind and deaf-blind people. Deaf and deaf-blind people performed the spatial tactile task better than the temporal one, while blind and controls showed the oppo- site pattern. Deaf and deaf-blind participants were impaired in temporal discrimination as compared to controls, while deaf-blind individuals outperformed blind participants in the spatial tactile task. Overall, sensory-deprived partici- pants did not show an enhanced tactile performance. We speculate that discriminative touch is not so relevant in humans, while social touch is. Probably, more complex tac- tile tasks would have revealed an increased performance in sensory-deprived people. Keywords Deafness · Blindness · Deaf-blind · Tactile temporal discrimination · Tactile spatial discrimination * Costanza Papagno costanza.papagno@unimib.it 1 Department of Psychology, University of Milano-Bicocca, Piazza dell’Ateneo Nuovo 1, 20126 Milan, Italy 2 NeuroMI, Milan Centre for Neuroscience, Milan, Italy 3 Laboratory of Neuropsychology, IRCCS Istituto Auxologico Italiano, Milan, Italy