The widespread intuition that sensory deprivation should enhance processing in the intact modalities has been primarily tested in unisensory contexts. This approach has the limit of not probing for potential changes in the interaction between intact modalities, ultimately not allowing to conclude whether documented unisensory advantages always dominate behavior. Here we examined whether deafness modifies the interactions between vision and touch, and to what extent enhanced processing of peripheral visual events – repeatedly documented in unisensory studies of deafness – dominates behavior also in a multisensory context in which vision is entirely task-irrelevant. Nine hearing and seven early-deaf adults performed two visuo-tactile tasks. In one task, participants responded to the elevation of a tactile stimulus while ignoring a concurrent visual stimulus (central or peripheral). The distractor was spatially congruent or incongruent with the target. The other task was reversed (i.e., respond to vision, ignore touch). Visuo-tactile interference emerged for all participants, revealing similar multisensory processing in the two groups. However, when vision was task relevant, deaf people were distracted by touch less than hearing controls when visual targets were peripheral. This reveals the expected enhanced processing for peripheral visual stimuli in deafness. Strikingly, when vision was task irrelevant (i.e., respond to touch) comparable visuo-tactile interference emerged in the two groups for both visual distractor eccentricities. These findings show that enhanced processing of peripheral visual information in deafness can be modulated as a function of task-demands, revealing a remarkable multisensory flexibility within a perceptual system reorganized by crossmodal plasticity.

deafness; cross-modal plasticity; multisensory interference