1. Does sight affect the ability to determine sound direction?
By: Jennifer Tellez & Rafael Jimenez
INTRODUCTION/PURPOSE
Like all heroes and fairy tales, the idea of blindness enhances other senses is all fiction right? The purpose of this experiment is to test if sight affect sound perception.
Hypothesis
If someone were in a situation where they cannot see we believe that the ability to determine sound direction would not be affected because sound waves are what enter into the ear which percept sound and sounds come from a certain direction allowing you to identify where the sound is coming from without using any visuals.
RESULTS
Using excel to calculate the t-score we had a correlation Because it is higher than .05 it is not significant which proved that sight didn’t have nothing to do with vision and the ability to have better or worse sound perception.
METHODSOLOGY
Materials
1-Blindfold
 2-4 phones that you can be able to call
 3-quiet room with enough space to separate phones
 4-stopwatch
 5-notebook
6-pencil
 7-chair
Procedure
For the experiment we set a chair in the middle of an area that wouldn’t have crowds of people. This area was quiet most of the time and it was not a hallway where people needed to pas by all the time. There were four phone (left, right, back , and front) each 11 feet of distance and we would call it and measure the time in seconds the subject took to point at the phone that was ringing. The procedure was preformed twice, once with the blindfold and one with out it.
CONCLUSION
Our Hypothesis was correct. According to our experiment subjects did take a bit longer to identify the ringing phone but only by a slight second which has little to no influence in the variables. Using statistics the t-test was used to calculate significance which showed no correlation indicating that vision did not affect sound perception.
BACKGROUND
An organization Acoustal Society of America stated that there is a connection with blindness enhancing other senses. They also preformed an experiment with blindfolds testing people with sight and wit out sight.
As the Journal of Neuroscience studies the fMRI of a deaf person and normal person, discovering that the fMRI of a deaf person had more activity meaning that the brain was working more which brings to the connection that People with out sight tend to have better sound perception.
From the graph above we can see that the time the subject took to point at the correct ringing phone is almost the same with blind fold and with out it. Some of our data even showed the subject pointing at the phone faster with the blind fold than with out it and vise versa which showed us that vision didn’t affect their sound perception.
Citations:
      Acoustical Society of America (ASA). (2012, May 8). 'Blindness’ may rapidly enhance other senses. ScienceDaily. Retrieved November 23, 2014 from
       Kearns, C. M. (2012, July 11). Altered cross-modal processing in the primary auditory cortex of congenitally deaf adults: A visual-somatosensory fmri study with a double-flash illusion. Retrieved from The Journal of Neuroscience website:  
Leggett, H. (2009, October 21). Out of lsd? just 15 minutes of sensory deprivation triggers hallucinations. Retrieved from Wired website:
(2014, February 8). Heighten your senses by simulating blindness! Retrieved from YouTube website:
Possible Mistakes that had bias in the results
After analyzing our results we did take into account that our background noise was not the same trough out the experiment and our phone all had a different ringtone which gave the subject a hint that another phone was ringing so he it reduced the probability of choosing the incorrect phone.
Safety & Concerns
Some possible factors that could have created bias where that the ringtones in the phone where not the same and we used ringtones instead a tone like the ones used in hearing test. Also the background noise was not consistent due to the fact that the experiment was done on different days and different times.
For additional information please contact:
[Jenny / Rafa]
[BI]
[Vista Peak Preparatory]