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Sensitive and critical periods in visual sensory deprivation

While the demonstration of crossmodal plasticity is well established in congenital and early blind individuals, great debate still surrounds whether those who acquire blindness later in life can also benefit from such compensatory changes. No proper consensus has been reached despite the fact that a...

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Autor principal: Voss, Patrice
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Frontiers Media S.A. 2013
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3783842/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24133469
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00664
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author Voss, Patrice
author_facet Voss, Patrice
author_sort Voss, Patrice
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description While the demonstration of crossmodal plasticity is well established in congenital and early blind individuals, great debate still surrounds whether those who acquire blindness later in life can also benefit from such compensatory changes. No proper consensus has been reached despite the fact that a proper understanding of the developmental time course of these changes, and whether their occurrence is limited to—or within—specific time windows, is crucial to our understanding of the crossmodal phenomena. An extensive review of the literature reveals that while the majority of investigations to date have examined the crossmodal plasticity available to late blind individuals in quantitative terms, recent findings rather suggest that this reorganization also likely changes qualitatively compared to what is observed in early blindness. This obviously could have significant repercussions not only for the training and rehabilitation of blind individuals, but for the development of appropriate neuroprostheses designed to aid and potentially restore vision. Important parallels will also be drawn with the current state of research on deafness, which is particularly relevant given in the development of successful neuroprostheses (e.g., cochlear implants) for providing auditory input to the central nervous system otherwise aurally deafferented. Lastly, this paper will address important inconsistencies across the literature concerning the definition of distinct blind groups based on the age of blindness onset, and propose several alternatives to using such a categorization.
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spelling pubmed-37838422013-10-16 Sensitive and critical periods in visual sensory deprivation Voss, Patrice Front Psychol Psychology While the demonstration of crossmodal plasticity is well established in congenital and early blind individuals, great debate still surrounds whether those who acquire blindness later in life can also benefit from such compensatory changes. No proper consensus has been reached despite the fact that a proper understanding of the developmental time course of these changes, and whether their occurrence is limited to—or within—specific time windows, is crucial to our understanding of the crossmodal phenomena. An extensive review of the literature reveals that while the majority of investigations to date have examined the crossmodal plasticity available to late blind individuals in quantitative terms, recent findings rather suggest that this reorganization also likely changes qualitatively compared to what is observed in early blindness. This obviously could have significant repercussions not only for the training and rehabilitation of blind individuals, but for the development of appropriate neuroprostheses designed to aid and potentially restore vision. Important parallels will also be drawn with the current state of research on deafness, which is particularly relevant given in the development of successful neuroprostheses (e.g., cochlear implants) for providing auditory input to the central nervous system otherwise aurally deafferented. Lastly, this paper will address important inconsistencies across the literature concerning the definition of distinct blind groups based on the age of blindness onset, and propose several alternatives to using such a categorization. Frontiers Media S.A. 2013-09-26 /pmc/articles/PMC3783842/ /pubmed/24133469 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00664 Text en Copyright © 2013 Voss. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
spellingShingle Psychology
Voss, Patrice
Sensitive and critical periods in visual sensory deprivation
title Sensitive and critical periods in visual sensory deprivation
title_full Sensitive and critical periods in visual sensory deprivation
title_fullStr Sensitive and critical periods in visual sensory deprivation
title_full_unstemmed Sensitive and critical periods in visual sensory deprivation
title_short Sensitive and critical periods in visual sensory deprivation
title_sort sensitive and critical periods in visual sensory deprivation
topic Psychology
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3783842/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24133469
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00664
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