Event-related potentials during auditory and somatosensory discrimination in sighted and blind human subjects

The objective of the present study was to test if and to what extent phasic and tonic event-related potentials of the human EEG may reflect phenomena of cortical plasticity. In particular, it was tested if the occipital cortex of blind subjects participates in the processing of non-visual stimuli. To this end, 12 blind and 12 blindfolded sighted subjects were tested in an auditory and a somatosensory discrimination task with 2 levels of discrimination difficulty. Slow and fast event-related potentials were recorded from 18 scalp electrodes. In addition to the negative slow waves found in sighted subjects over frontal and central sites during auditory and somatosensory discrimination, a pronounced negative wave was revealed in the blind also over occipital brain areas. These negative shifts were time-locked to the train of stimuli which had to be monitored with sustained attention, i.e. they rised and resolved with the beginning and the end of a 20-s discrimination time epoch. The P300 complex, on the other hand, which is a slow positive deflection over the posterior part of the scalp and which follows rare and task-relevant events 200-800 ms after stimulus onset was significantly smaller at occipital electrodes in the blind than in the sighted subjects. Combined with neurophysiological and neuronanatomical evidence originating from studies with visually deprived animals, these data suggest that the occipital cortex of blind human subjects is coactivated whenever the system is engaged in a task which requires sustained attention and is less effectively inhibited at the end of a perceptual time epoch. In total, the data cast doubt on the hypothesis that the occipital cortex of blind subjects participates in modality-specific non-visual information processing.