'Visual' parsing can be taught quickly without visual experience during critical periods

Area of Science:

• Neuroscience
• Sensory Perception
• Rehabilitation Science

Background:

• Acquiring visual abilities post-congenital blindness is challenging due to critical-period visual experience.
• Visual rehabilitation often involves invasive methods or sensory substitution devices (SSDs).
• Visual parsing, a key visual concept, is often impaired in individuals with restored sight.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate if visual parsing can be learned by congenitally blind adults using SSDs.
• To assess the efficacy of SSDs in compensating for the lack of early visual experience.
• To compare SSD-based visual parsing abilities with those of sight-restored patients.

Main Methods:

• Congenitally blind adults underwent approximately 70 hours of SSD 'vision' training.
• Participants performed visual parsing tasks involving 2D and 3D objects post-training.
• Performance was compared against control individuals naive to SSDs and historical data from sight-restored patients.

Main Results:

• SSD-trained participants successfully learned to parse 2D and 3D visual objects.
• Success could not be solely attributed to auditory processing, as shown by control groups.
• SSD users outperformed sight-restored patients on most visual parsing criteria, despite less training time.

Conclusions:

• Sensory substitution devices (SSDs) can enable rapid acquisition of high-order visual features like parsing in adulthood.
• SSDs offer a promising non-invasive method to compensate for critical-period visual deprivation.
• SSDs show potential as standalone aids or adjuncts to invasive sight restoration therapies.