Braille Reading & Adaptive Plasticity in the Human Brain

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• 批准号: 7028788
• 负责人: Harold Burton
• 金额: $ 47.1万
• 依托单位: WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 财政年份: 1999
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 1999-07-01 至 2009-12-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/7028788
• 关键词: auditory stimulus; behavioral /social science research tag; bioimaging /biomedical imaging; blindness; brain imaging /visualization /scanning; brain mapping; clinical research; functional magnetic resonance imaging; human subject; language; memory; neural information processing; neural plasticity; perception; performance; psychomotor reaction time; reading; touch; visual cortex

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): This proposal is designed to understand the functional architecture supporting behavioral adaptations to blindness. It is likely that visual cortex plays a major role because its activity increases in blind people during various non-visual perceptual and cognitive tasks. In addition, disruption of occipital cortex in blind people impairs Braille reading, indicating a likely role in this critical skill. Blind people also exhibit superior perceptual processing of non-visual stimuli. Based on these findings, we will explore three hypotheses: (1) Reorganized visual cortex respects principles of hierarchical processing and domain specialization found in sighted people that are related both to retinotopic visual areas and to the fovea-periphery eccentricity axis. (2) Reorganized visual cortex contributes to perceptual and cognitive behaviors in blind people. (3) Enhanced performance noted in blind people on a variety of tasks correlates with and perhaps is causally related to altered response dynamics outside visual cortex. An integrated set of fMRI studies in congenitally/early blind, adventitously blind, and normally sighted people will be used to assess these hypotheses. The results from two studies will be analyzed to reveal the degree to which early visual areas and/or regions of foveal representation selectively process lower level tasks like sublexical processing or stimulus amplitude detection, and whether higher visual occipito-temporal areas and/or parafoveal/peripheral eccentricity representations selectively process more complex tasks like semantic categorization or sensory working memory. The results from another two studies will be analyzed to reveal the degree to which overlapping or subparts of occipito- temporal areas and/or parafoveal/peripheral eccentricity representations process higher level recognition memory for non-verbal and verbal items. Submodality separation in reorganized visual cortex will be assessed from studies involving stimulation with tactile vibrations or auditory tones in separate experiments. In all experiments blood oxygen level dependent response dynamics in visual and selective non-visual areas will be quantitatively analyzed and correlated with performance to determine likely causal relationships.

描述（由申请人提供）：该提案旨在理解支持失明行为适应的功能架构。视觉皮层很可能发挥着重要作用，因为盲人在执行各种非视觉感知和认知任务时其活动会增加。此外，盲人枕叶皮质的破坏会损害盲文阅读能力，表明这一关键技能可能发挥着作用。盲人还表现出对非视觉刺激的卓越感知处理能力。基于这些发现，我们将探讨三个假设：（1）重组的视觉皮层遵循在视力正常的人中发现的与视网膜专题视觉区域和中央凹-外周偏心轴相关的分层处理和领域专业化原则。 (2)重组的视觉皮层有助于盲人的感知和认知行为。 (3) 盲人在各种任务中表现的增强与视觉皮层外部反应动态的改变相关，并且可能是因果关系。对先天/早期失明、偶然失明和视力正常的人进行的一组综合功能磁共振成像研究将用于评估这些假设。将分析两项研究的结果，以揭示早期视觉区域和/或中央凹表征区域选择性处理较低水平任务（如词汇下处理或刺激幅度检测）的程度，以及较高视觉枕颞区域和/或中央凹/外围偏心率表征选择性地处理更复杂的任务，例如语义分类或感觉工作记忆。另外两项研究的结果将被分析，以揭示枕颞区的重叠或子部分和/或中心凹/外周偏心表征处理非语言和语言项目的更高水平的识别记忆的程度。重组视觉皮层中的子模态分离将通过单独实验中涉及触觉振动或听觉刺激的研究来评估。在所有实验中，将对视觉和选择性非视觉区域的血氧水平依赖性反应动态进行定量分析，并将其与表现相关联，以确定可能的因果关系。