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Reversible Cooling-induced Deactivations to Study Cortical Contributions to Obstacle Memory in the Walking Cat

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Cross-modal plasticity preserves functional specialization in posterior parietal cortex.

Angelika Lingnau¹, Lukas Strnad, Chenxi He

¹Center for Mind/Brain Sciences (CIMeC), University of Trento, Italy.

Cerebral Cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991)

|November 3, 2012

Summary

Cross-modal plasticity in the brain allows nonvisual tasks to recruit visual processing regions. This study shows that brain regions retain their computational roles, guiding how they adapt to new sensory inputs in blind individuals.

Keywords:

congenital blindness cross-modal plasticity proprioceptively guided reaching

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Area of Science:

Neuroscience
Cognitive Neuroscience
Neuroplasticity

Background:

Cross-modal plasticity is the brain's ability to repurpose visual processing areas for nonvisual tasks in congenitally blind individuals.
Principles governing cross-modal changes in the brain remain poorly understood.

Purpose of the Study:

To test the hypothesis that cross-modal plasticity preserves a brain region's computational function, regardless of sensory input modality.
To investigate how the brain adapts in the absence of visual input.

Main Methods:

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used to compare brain activity in sighted and congenitally blind participants.
Participants performed proprioceptively guided reaching tasks.

Main Results:

Parietooccipital regions involved in reaching maintained their function of encoding spatial target information.
This functional preservation occurred despite the shift from visual to nonvisual sensory inputs in blind individuals.

Conclusions:

The computational role of a brain region is a key factor in its cross-modal recruitment.
Functional properties guide cross-modal plasticity, extending beyond early visual cortex to visuomotor regions.