Braille Reading & Adaptive Plasticity in the Human Brain

盲文阅读

• 批准号: 7352701
• 负责人: Harold Burton
• 金额: $ 49.68万
• 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/7352701
• 关键词: Architecture; Area; Auditory; Behavior; Behavioral; Blindness; Brain; Categories; Cerebral cortex; Cognitive; Complex; Detection; Disruption; Exhibits; Frequencies; Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging; Hearing; Human; Language; Letters; Linguistics; Memory; Neurobiology; Occipital lobe; Parietal; Pattern; Performance; Peripheral; Play; Process; Reaction Time; Reading; Research Personnel; Role; Sampling; Semantics; Sensory; Short-Term Memory; Specificity; Stimulus; Tactile; Testing; Vision; Visual; Visual Cortex; Visually Impaired Persons; base; blind; blood oxygen level dependent; blood oxygenation level dependent response; braille; design; extrastriate visual cortex; fovea centralis; insight; memory recognition; programs; relating to nervous system; research study; response; retinotopic; sight for the blind; skills; vibration; visual stimulus

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.

该提案旨在了解支持行为适应的功能架构 失明。视觉皮层很可能发挥着重要作用，因为盲人在工作期间视觉皮层的活动会增加。 各种非视觉感知和认知任务。此外，盲人枕叶皮质受到破坏 损害盲文阅读能力，表明这一关键技能可能发挥作用。盲人也表现出优越的感知能力 处理非视觉刺激。基于这些发现，我们将探讨三个假设：（1）重组 视觉皮层尊重视力正常的人的分层处理和领域专业化原则 与视网膜专题视觉区域和中央凹-外周偏心率轴相关。 （二）重组 视觉皮层有助于盲人的感知和认知行为。 (3) 性能增强 盲人在各种任务中注意到与反应改变相关，并且可能是因果关系 视觉皮层外的动态。先天性/早期失明、偶然性失明的一组综合功能磁共振成像研究 盲人和视力正常的人将被用来评估这些假设。两项研究的结果将 进行分析以揭示早期视觉区域和/或中央凹代表区域的程度 选择性地处理较低级别的任务，例如词汇下处理或刺激幅度检测，以及是否 选择性地提供更高的视觉枕颞区和/或中心凹/外周偏心率表征 处理更复杂的任务，例如语义分类或感觉工作记忆。结果来自 将分析另外两项研究，以揭示枕骨重叠或子部分的程度 颞区和/或中心凹/外周偏心率表征可处理更高级别的识别 对非语言和语言项目的记忆。重组视觉皮层中的子模态分离将 根据单独实验中涉及触觉振动或听觉刺激的研究进行评估。 在所有实验中，视觉和选择性非视觉区域的血氧水平依赖性反应动力学 将进行定量分析并与绩效相关联，以确定可能的因果关系。