Urface with dot patterns, as shown in the bottom of the image.Brain places are shown that responded throughout tactile or optic flow perception in sighted subjects and throughout tactile flow perception in blind subjects.The tactilevisual overlap map shows the places Autophagy activated by both tactile and optic flow perception (shown in yellow), also because the regions activated only by tactile (red) and optic (green) perception (modified from Pietrini et al Ricciardi et al).www.frontiersin.orgFebruary Volume Post Kupers et al.Blindness and consciousness,).Of note, congenitally blind people showed categoryspecific neural response patterns in the ventral temporal extrastriate cortex through the identical tactile object recognition process that have been comparable to those measured in sighted controls (Figure B).Our findings expand outcomes from other laboratories that in sighted individuals visual and tactile object perception activate the dorsal part of the lateral occipital cortex (LOC suitable; Amedi et al , James et al) by showing a crossmodal correlation of response patterns among the two sensory modalities.Additionally, our final results in congenitally blind folks clearly indicate that visual imagery cannot account for the visual cortex activation throughout the tactile process (James et al Sathian and Zangaladze, Matteau et al).Certainly, when it has been shown that seeing an object or recalling the image of that object by way of visual imagery leads to equivalent neural responses inside the brain (Ishai et al O’Craven and Kanwisher, Ishai,), visually primarily based imagery is by definition absent in congenitally blind or early blind subjects with no recollection of visual practical experience (although congenitally blind subjects do have imagery! See evaluation by Cattaneo et al).The findings inside the congenitally blind subjects are vital also due to the fact they indicate that the improvement of topographically organized, categoryrelated representations inside the extrastriate visual cortex does not call for visual expertise.Knowledge with objects acquired by means of other sensory modalities seems to become sufficient to assistance the improvement of these patterns.Therefore, a minimum of to some extent, the visual cortex doesn’t demand vision to create its functional architecture that tends to make it possible to acquire understanding of your external globe.style Furthermore, that is the impact of visual practical experience around the improvement with the functional architecture in motion responsive cortical regions To investigate these concerns, we compared brain responses in sighted and congenitally or early blind people through passive perception of visual andor tactile motion (Ricciardi et al).Perception of dynamic stimuli inside the visual and tactile sensory modalities shares fundamental psychophysical principles which will be explained by similar computational models.Each optic and tactile motion offer data about object form, position, orientation, consistency and movement, as well as in regards to the position and movement on the self in the atmosphere (Bicchi et al ).In sighted subjects, visual motion perception induced activation in the human middle temporal (hMT) complicated in the posterior inferior temporal cortex bilaterally, PubMed ID:http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21542721 as expected on the basis of prior research (Watson et al Ptito et al a).In contrast, tactile motion perception activated the anterior aspect but deactivated a more posterior part of the hMT complex (Figure C).In blind subjects, tactile motion activated not merely the anterior portion but additionally the more posterior.
