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Sight restoration after congenital blindness does not reinstate alpha oscillatory activity in humans

Functional brain development is characterized by sensitive periods during which experience must be available to allow for the full development of neural circuits and associated behavior. Yet, only few neural markers of sensitive period plasticity in humans are known. Here we employed electroencephal...

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Autores principales: Bottari, Davide, Troje, Nikolaus F., Ley, Pia, Hense, Marlene, Kekunnaya, Ramesh, Röder, Brigitte
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Nature Publishing Group 2016
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4832338/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27080158
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/srep24683
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author Bottari, Davide
Troje, Nikolaus F.
Ley, Pia
Hense, Marlene
Kekunnaya, Ramesh
Röder, Brigitte
author_facet Bottari, Davide
Troje, Nikolaus F.
Ley, Pia
Hense, Marlene
Kekunnaya, Ramesh
Röder, Brigitte
author_sort Bottari, Davide
collection PubMed
description Functional brain development is characterized by sensitive periods during which experience must be available to allow for the full development of neural circuits and associated behavior. Yet, only few neural markers of sensitive period plasticity in humans are known. Here we employed electroencephalographic recordings in a unique sample of twelve humans who had been blind from birth and regained sight through cataract surgery between four months and 16 years of age. Two additional control groups were tested: a group of visually impaired individuals without a history of total congenital blindness and a group of typically sighted individuals. The EEG was recorded while participants performed a visual discrimination task involving intact and scrambled biological motion stimuli. Posterior alpha and theta oscillations were evaluated. The three groups showed indistinguishable behavioral performance and in all groups evoked theta activity varied with biological motion processing. By contrast, alpha oscillatory activity was significantly reduced only in individuals with a history of congenital cataracts. These data document on the one hand brain mechanisms of functional recovery (related to theta oscillations) and on the other hand, for the first time, a sensitive period for the development of alpha oscillatory activity in humans.
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spelling pubmed-48323382016-04-20 Sight restoration after congenital blindness does not reinstate alpha oscillatory activity in humans Bottari, Davide Troje, Nikolaus F. Ley, Pia Hense, Marlene Kekunnaya, Ramesh Röder, Brigitte Sci Rep Article Functional brain development is characterized by sensitive periods during which experience must be available to allow for the full development of neural circuits and associated behavior. Yet, only few neural markers of sensitive period plasticity in humans are known. Here we employed electroencephalographic recordings in a unique sample of twelve humans who had been blind from birth and regained sight through cataract surgery between four months and 16 years of age. Two additional control groups were tested: a group of visually impaired individuals without a history of total congenital blindness and a group of typically sighted individuals. The EEG was recorded while participants performed a visual discrimination task involving intact and scrambled biological motion stimuli. Posterior alpha and theta oscillations were evaluated. The three groups showed indistinguishable behavioral performance and in all groups evoked theta activity varied with biological motion processing. By contrast, alpha oscillatory activity was significantly reduced only in individuals with a history of congenital cataracts. These data document on the one hand brain mechanisms of functional recovery (related to theta oscillations) and on the other hand, for the first time, a sensitive period for the development of alpha oscillatory activity in humans. Nature Publishing Group 2016-04-15 /pmc/articles/PMC4832338/ /pubmed/27080158 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/srep24683 Text en Copyright © 2016, Macmillan Publishers Limited http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in the credit line; if the material is not included under the Creative Commons license, users will need to obtain permission from the license holder to reproduce the material. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
spellingShingle Article
Bottari, Davide
Troje, Nikolaus F.
Ley, Pia
Hense, Marlene
Kekunnaya, Ramesh
Röder, Brigitte
Sight restoration after congenital blindness does not reinstate alpha oscillatory activity in humans
title Sight restoration after congenital blindness does not reinstate alpha oscillatory activity in humans
title_full Sight restoration after congenital blindness does not reinstate alpha oscillatory activity in humans
title_fullStr Sight restoration after congenital blindness does not reinstate alpha oscillatory activity in humans
title_full_unstemmed Sight restoration after congenital blindness does not reinstate alpha oscillatory activity in humans
title_short Sight restoration after congenital blindness does not reinstate alpha oscillatory activity in humans
title_sort sight restoration after congenital blindness does not reinstate alpha oscillatory activity in humans
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4832338/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27080158
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/srep24683
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