Critical Period for Cross-Modal Plasticity in Blind Humans: A Functional MRI Study

@article{Sadato2002CriticalPF,
  title={Critical Period for Cross-Modal Plasticity in Blind Humans: A Functional MRI Study},
  author={Norihiro Sadato and Tomohisa Okada and Manabu Honda and Yoshiharu Yonekura},
  journal={NeuroImage},
  year={2002},
  volume={16},
  pages={389-400}
}
The primary visual cortex (V1) in congenitally blind humans has been shown to be involved in tactile discrimination tasks, indicating that there is a shift in function of this area of cortex, but the age dependency of the reorganization is not fully known. To investigate the reorganized network, we measured the change of regional cerebral blood flow using 3.0 Tesla functional MRI during passive tactile tasks performed by 15 blind and 8 sighted subjects. There was increased activity in the… Expand
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Comparing visual cortex function in individuals who lost their vision as adults (after age 17) to congenitally blind and sighted blindfolded adults shows cognitive repurposing of human cortex is limited by sensitive periods. Expand
Sensitive Period for Cognitive Repurposing of Human Visual Cortex.
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Comparing visual cortex function in individuals who lost their vision as adults (after age 17) to congenitally blind and sighted blindfolded adults shows cognitive repurposing of human cortex is limited by sensitive periods. Expand
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It is concluded that blindfolding sighted individuals for a 2-h period induces significant changes in the neural processing of tactile form, probably reflecting short-term neural plasticity. Expand
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Cortical activity during tactile exploration of objects in blind and sighted humans.
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These findings suggest that visual imagery is not an obligatory condition for object activation in visual cortex, and demonstrates the massive plasticity inVisual cortex of the blind for tactile object recognition that involves both the ventral and dorsal occipital areas, probably to support the high demand for this function in the blind. Expand
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Cross-modal plasticity revealed by electrotactile stimulation of the tongue in the congenitally blind.
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The data reveal that cross-modal plasticity in the blind develops rapidly and that the occipital cortex is part of a functional neural network for tactile discrimination in conjunction with the posterior parietal cortex, and show that the tongue can act as a portal to convey somatosensory information to visual cortex. Expand
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TLDR
The results indicate that congenitally blind subjects recruit key regions in the ventral visual pathway during nonhaptic tactile shape discrimination, and suggest that the segregation of the efferent projections of the primary visual cortex into a dorsal and ventralVisual stream is preserved in individuals blind from birth. Expand
An investigation of cross-modal plasticity of effective connectivity in the blind by dynamic causal modeling of functional MRI data
TLDR
D dorsal visual regions are involved in the functional shift in V1 from visual to tactile information processing in blind subjects, and visual deprivation may induce reorganization of the visual cortical areas due to the competitive shift for tactile inputs. Expand
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