The effect of 3D virtual reality on sequential time perception among deaf and hard-of-hearing children

Over the years deaf and hard-of-hearing children have been reported as having difficulty with time conception and, in particular, the proper arrangement of events in a logical, temporal order. The research examined whether deaf and hard-of-hearing children perceive a temporal sequence differently under different representational modes. We compared the effect of three-dimensional (3D) virtual reality (VR) representation on sequential time perception among deaf and hard-of-hearing children with pictorial, textual, spoken and signed representation. We studied 69 participants aged 4-10, who were divided into two age groups: kindergarten and school age. Using different modes of representation, we examined the children's ability to arrange episodes of a script in which a temporal order existed. Following the representation stages suggested by Bruner, we included six scripts that were adapted to the different modes of representation and thus created a sum of 30 scripts. The findings demonstrate that the VR 3D representation and the signed representation enabled the best perception of sequential time. The poorest results were for the textual representation. An interesting finding was that the pictorial representation scored low, indicating that this form of representation is not as easy as expected.