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Anna-Lena Stroh1*, Dominika Radziun2,3*, Maksymilian Korczyk1, Laura Crucianelli2,4, H. Henrik Ehrsson2*, Marcin Szwed1*
1Institute of Psychology, Jagiellonian University, Kraków, Poland
2Department of Neuroscience, Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden
3Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands
4Department of Biological and Experimental Psychology, Queen Mary University of London, United Kingdom
* ALS and DR shared first authorship; HHE and MS shared senior authorship
Blindness is associated with heightened sensory abilities, such as improved hearing and tactile acuity. Moreover, recent evidence suggests that blind individuals are better than sighted individuals at perceiving their own heartbeat, suggesting enhanced interoceptive accuracy. Structural changes in the occipital cortex have been hypothesized as the basis of these behavioral enhancements. Indeed, several studies have shown that congenitally blind individuals have increased cortical thickness within occipital areas compared to sighted individuals, but how these structural differences relate to behavioral enhancements is unclear. This study investigated the relationship between cardiac interoceptive accuracy and cortical thickness in 23 congenitally blind individuals and 23 matched sighted controls. Consistent with previous studies, we observed thicker occipital cortices in blind individuals. Moreover, we observed a significant positive correlation between performance in a heartbeat counting task and cortical thickness only in the blind group, indicating a connection between structural changes in occipital areas and blind individuals’ heightened ability to perceive heartbeats.
Funding: This work was supported by the Polish National Science Centre (NCN; grant no: 2018/30/A/HS6/00595), the Swedish Research Council (VR; grant no: 2017-03135), and Göran Gustafsson Stiftelse. Laura Crucianelli was supported by the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Intra-European Individual Fellowship (grant no: 891175). The funding sources were not involved in the study design, collection, analyses, and interpretation of the data or in the writing of this paper. The authors declare no competing interests.
Maksymilian Korczyk1, Katarzyna Rączy2+, Marcin Szwed1+
1Department of Psychology, Jagiellonian University, Krakow, Poland
2Institute of Psychology, University of Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany
+Authors share the senior authorship
Mirror-invariant phenomenon refers to the visual and tactile process of recognizing objects presented in mirror orientation as identical. In sighted individuals, the fusiform cortex is engaged in visual mirror invariance and mirror discrimination for letters. However, learning to read "breaks" mirror invariance for letters because mirror letters are recognized as different objects ("d"versus"b"). Only the parietal cortex is activated during tactile mirror invariance process. In congenitally blind individuals, abstract mirror shapes engage the lateral occipital cortex. In this study, we aimed to investigate the neural underpinnings of mirror-invariant processing of tactile objects in congenitally blind individuals.
Eighteen congenitally blind adults participated in the study. In the behavioral same-different comparison tasks and in the fMRI priming paradigm, we used pairs of Braille characters and everyday objects presented in identical ("p"&”p"), mirror ("p"&"q"), and different ("p"&"z") orientation.
Behavioral results showed no interference of orientation on the shape-judgment, either for Braille characters or everyday objects. FMRI results demonstrated a repetition suppression for identical and mirror pairs of everyday objects in parietal and lateral occipital cortex, with the latter region exhibiting repetition suppression only for identical Braille characters pairs. These findings together suggest that Braille characters are primarily processed as shapes in blind individuals.
Małgorzata Paczyńska¹, Marta Urbaniak²,³, Marta Dębecka², Łukasz Bola²
¹SWPS University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Warsaw, Poland
²Institute of Psychology, Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw, Poland
³Graduate School for Social Research, Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw, Poland
Language processing involves similar brain regions across languages and cultures. Intriguingly, one population escapes this universal pattern: in blind individuals, linguistic stimuli activate not only the canonical language networks, but also the “visual” cortex. What is represented in the visual areas when blind individuals process language? To address this question, we performed an fMRI study in which we presented congenitally blind and sighted participants with spoken and written words. Using the representational similarity analysis, we showed that, in both participant groups, the visual cortex represents physical similarity between word referents, but not more abstract, conceptual similarity. This suggests that activations for language in the blind visual cortex might be driven by representational mechanisms that are present also in the sighted, adult brain. In sighted individuals, the physical properties of word referents might be backprojected to the visual system to predict incoming visual information, initiate visual imagery, and support visuospatial thinking. In blind individuals, this mechanism might be preserved and, when combined with weaker inhibition of activity in the visual cortex, drive strong responses to language in this region.
Funding: This work was supported by a National Science Center Poland grant (2020/37/B/HS6/01269) and a Polish National Center for Academic Exchange fellowship (BPN/SEL/2021/1/00004) to Ł.B.
Maciej Gaca1, Alicja M. Olszewska1, Dawid Droździel1, Małgorzata Paplińska2, Agnieszka Kulesza1, Katarzyna Jednoróg3, Jacek Matuszewski1, Aleksandra M. Herman1, Artur Marchewka1
1Laboratory of Brain Imaging, Nencki Institute of Experimental Biology of the Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw, Poland
2The Maria Grzegorzewska University, Warsaw, Poland
3Laboratory of Language Neurobiology, Nencki Institute of Experimental Biology of the Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw, Poland
The human brain possesses an extraordinary capacity to reorganize itself in response to experience. In blind individuals, the occipital cortex undergoes substantial sensory tuning changes to process auditory or tactile inputs. Furthermore, recent neuroimaging studies show that tactile reading can engage the visual cortex of sighted subjects, providing an opportunity to investigate the limits of experience-dependent neuroplasticity.
Here, we investigate tactile reading in blind and sighted individuals during a Lexical Decision Task to see differences and similarities in cross-modal plasticity between the groups.
The fMRI analysis revealed high activity in both groups in the Visual Word Form Area (VWFA), underscoring its modality-independent role. There was a significant increase in activity in the reading network and sensory perception areas in blind participants compared to sighted. On the other hand, sighted individuals showed higher activity than blind individuals in regions associated with motor control and spatial navigation.
The findings illustrate cross-modal plasticity, with visual processing areas repurposed for tactile input, enabling linguistic comprehension through tactile modality.
This research contributes to our understanding of neuroplasticity, revealing converging adaptations in both the blind and the sighted. It highlights the flexibility of the human brain, advancing our knowledge of how sensory experiences shape cognitive processes.
Funding: National Science Centre (Poland) – Sonata BIS (2018/30/E/HS6/00206)
Jacek Matuszewski1, Marco Barilari1, Olivier Collignon1,2
1Cross-modal Plasticity and Perception Lab, Institute for Research in Psychology (IPSY) and Institute of Neuroscience (IoNS), Université catholique de Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium
2School of Health Sciences, HES-SO Valais-Wallis, The Sense Innovation and Research Center, Lausanne, Switzerland
People born with sensory deprivation provide a fascinating “natural” model to study the brain’s functional architecture. Previous studies showed that Braille and spoken words can activate portions of the blind occipital cortex typically responding to written words in vision. Whether written and spoken material co-activates similar regions and whether such activations are unique to blind people remains debated. Here, we used fMRI to probe brain responses to words, pseudowords and sensory control stimuli during reading and speech in 20 congenitally blind and sighted controls. Our results showed that while the blind early visual cortex (EVC) responded to simple sensory stimuli and linguistic information, activity in the left ventral occipitotemporal cortex (vOTC) was specific to Braille or spoken linguistic material. Similar patterns were observed in sighted subjects, with stronger activation for reading. Multivoxel pattern analyses showed that linguistic information in the EVC and vOTC can be decoded from the control conditions both in reading and speech in both groups. Crossmodal decoding analyses showed that reading and speech representations in vOTC might be partially shared in both sighted and blind. These results suggest that the crossmodal occipital reorganization for linguistic processing observed in blindness might be more quantitative, than qualitative.
Funding: NCN Preludium 2017/27/N/HS6/02669; FSR Postdoctoral Grant 2021Incoming
Cemal Koba1, Anna-Lena Stroh2, Marcin Szwed2, Olivier Collignon3,4
1Computer Vision Group, Sano Centre for Computational Medicine, Krakow, Poland
2Institute of Psychology, Jagiellonian University, Kraków, Poland
3Institute for Research in Psychology (IPSY) & Neuroscience (IoNS), University of Louvain (UCLouvain), Louvain, Belgium
4School of Health Sciences, HES-SO Valais-Wallis, The Sense Innovation and Research Center, Lausanne & Sion, Switzerland
The cortex is organized along macroscale functional gradients that extend from unimodal (somatosensory/motor and visual) to transmodal association areas, and from somatosensory to visual areas. Whether this core organizing axis is an intrinsic organizational neuro-architecture immune to experience or, instead, depends on sensory input during development has not been tested. To this end, we conducted connectome gradient analyses based on resting-state functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (rs-fMRI) in congenitally blind (n = 14) and late blind (n = 11) individuals, comparing them to two groups of sighted controls (n= 14, n = 11, respectively) who were matched for age and gender.
Compared to sighted individuals, congenitally blind individuals showed more extreme gradient values in both axes of the second gradient, which is formed on the visual-somatosensory plane. Our results suggest that blindness leads to dispersion in the sensorimotor-visual organization of the brain. Taken together, our findings provide important insights into the critical role of sensory input during development in shaping the macroscale cortical functional organization.
Funding: This publication is supported by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement Sano No 857533, and carried out within the International Research Agendas program of the Foundation for Polish Science, co-financed by the European Union under the European Regional Development Fund.
