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Increased BOLD Variability in the Parietal Cortex and Enhanced Parieto-Occipital Connectivity during Tactile Perception in Congenitally Blind Individuals
Previous studies in early blind individuals posited a possible role of parieto-occipital connections in conveying nonvisual information to the visual occipital cortex. As a consequence of blindness, parietal areas would thus become able to integrate a greater amount of multimodal information than in...
Autores principales: | , , , , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
Hindawi Publishing Corporation
2012
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3388315/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22792493 http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2012/720278 |
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author | Leo, Andrea Bernardi, Giulio Handjaras, Giacomo Bonino, Daniela Ricciardi, Emiliano Pietrini, Pietro |
author_facet | Leo, Andrea Bernardi, Giulio Handjaras, Giacomo Bonino, Daniela Ricciardi, Emiliano Pietrini, Pietro |
author_sort | Leo, Andrea |
collection | PubMed |
description | Previous studies in early blind individuals posited a possible role of parieto-occipital connections in conveying nonvisual information to the visual occipital cortex. As a consequence of blindness, parietal areas would thus become able to integrate a greater amount of multimodal information than in sighted individuals. To verify this hypothesis, we compared fMRI-measured BOLD signal temporal variability, an index of efficiency in functional information integration, in congenitally blind and sighted individuals during tactile spatial discrimination and motion perception tasks. In both tasks, the BOLD variability analysis revealed many cortical regions with a significantly greater variability in the blind as compared to sighted individuals, with an overlapping cluster located in the left inferior parietal/anterior intraparietal cortex. A functional connectivity analysis using this region as seed showed stronger correlations in both tasks with occipital areas in the blind as compared to sighted individuals. As BOLD variability reflects neural integration and processing efficiency, these cross-modal plastic changes in the parietal cortex, even if described in a limited sample, reinforce the hypothesis that this region may play an important role in processing nonvisual information in blind subjects and act as a hub in the cortico-cortical pathway from somatosensory cortex to the reorganized occipital areas. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-3388315 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2012 |
publisher | Hindawi Publishing Corporation |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-33883152012-07-12 Increased BOLD Variability in the Parietal Cortex and Enhanced Parieto-Occipital Connectivity during Tactile Perception in Congenitally Blind Individuals Leo, Andrea Bernardi, Giulio Handjaras, Giacomo Bonino, Daniela Ricciardi, Emiliano Pietrini, Pietro Neural Plast Clinical Study Previous studies in early blind individuals posited a possible role of parieto-occipital connections in conveying nonvisual information to the visual occipital cortex. As a consequence of blindness, parietal areas would thus become able to integrate a greater amount of multimodal information than in sighted individuals. To verify this hypothesis, we compared fMRI-measured BOLD signal temporal variability, an index of efficiency in functional information integration, in congenitally blind and sighted individuals during tactile spatial discrimination and motion perception tasks. In both tasks, the BOLD variability analysis revealed many cortical regions with a significantly greater variability in the blind as compared to sighted individuals, with an overlapping cluster located in the left inferior parietal/anterior intraparietal cortex. A functional connectivity analysis using this region as seed showed stronger correlations in both tasks with occipital areas in the blind as compared to sighted individuals. As BOLD variability reflects neural integration and processing efficiency, these cross-modal plastic changes in the parietal cortex, even if described in a limited sample, reinforce the hypothesis that this region may play an important role in processing nonvisual information in blind subjects and act as a hub in the cortico-cortical pathway from somatosensory cortex to the reorganized occipital areas. Hindawi Publishing Corporation 2012 2012-06-20 /pmc/articles/PMC3388315/ /pubmed/22792493 http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2012/720278 Text en Copyright © 2012 Andrea Leo et al. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. |
spellingShingle | Clinical Study Leo, Andrea Bernardi, Giulio Handjaras, Giacomo Bonino, Daniela Ricciardi, Emiliano Pietrini, Pietro Increased BOLD Variability in the Parietal Cortex and Enhanced Parieto-Occipital Connectivity during Tactile Perception in Congenitally Blind Individuals |
title | Increased BOLD Variability in the Parietal Cortex and Enhanced Parieto-Occipital Connectivity during Tactile Perception in Congenitally Blind Individuals |
title_full | Increased BOLD Variability in the Parietal Cortex and Enhanced Parieto-Occipital Connectivity during Tactile Perception in Congenitally Blind Individuals |
title_fullStr | Increased BOLD Variability in the Parietal Cortex and Enhanced Parieto-Occipital Connectivity during Tactile Perception in Congenitally Blind Individuals |
title_full_unstemmed | Increased BOLD Variability in the Parietal Cortex and Enhanced Parieto-Occipital Connectivity during Tactile Perception in Congenitally Blind Individuals |
title_short | Increased BOLD Variability in the Parietal Cortex and Enhanced Parieto-Occipital Connectivity during Tactile Perception in Congenitally Blind Individuals |
title_sort | increased bold variability in the parietal cortex and enhanced parieto-occipital connectivity during tactile perception in congenitally blind individuals |
topic | Clinical Study |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3388315/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22792493 http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2012/720278 |
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