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Early Blind

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early blind

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2 curated items2 Seminars
Updated 9 months ago
2 items · early blind
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SeminarNeuroscienceRecording

Altered grid-like coding in early blind people and the role of vision in conceptual navigation

Roberto Bottini
CIMeC, University of Trento
Mar 5, 2025
SeminarNeuroscienceRecording

Do you hear what I see: Auditory motion processing in blind individuals

Ione Fine
University of Washington
Oct 6, 2021

Perception of object motion is fundamentally multisensory, yet little is known about similarities and differences in the computations that give rise to our experience across senses. Insight can be provided by examining auditory motion processing in early blind individuals. In those who become blind early in life, the ‘visual’ motion area hMT+ responds to auditory motion. Meanwhile, the planum temporale, associated with auditory motion in sighted individuals, shows reduced selectivity for auditory motion, suggesting competition between cortical areas for functional role. According to the metamodal hypothesis of cross-modal plasticity developed by Pascual-Leone, the recruitment of hMT+ is driven by it being a metamodal structure containing “operators that execute a given function or computation regardless of sensory input modality”. Thus, the metamodal hypothesis predicts that the computations underlying auditory motion processing in early blind individuals should be analogous to visual motion processing in sighted individuals - relying on non-separable spatiotemporal filters. Inconsistent with the metamodal hypothesis, evidence suggests that the computational algorithms underlying auditory motion processing in early blind individuals fail to undergo a qualitative shift as a result of cross-modal plasticity. Auditory motion filters, in both blind and sighted subjects, are separable in space and time, suggesting that the recruitment of hMT+ to extract motion information from auditory input includes a significant modification of its normal computational operations.