Abstract
In congenital blindness (CB), tactile, and auditory information can be reinterpreted by the brain to compensate for visual information through mechanisms of brain plasticity triggered by training. Visual deprivation does not cause a cognitive spatial deficit since blind people are able to acquire spatial knowledge about the environment. However, this spatial competence takes longer to achieve but is eventually reached through training-induced plasticity. Congenitally blind individuals can further improve their spatial skills with the extensive use of sensory substitution devices (SSDs), either visual-to-tactile or visual-to-auditory. Using a combination of functional and anatomical neuroimaging techniques, our recent work has demonstrated the impact of spatial training with both visual to tactile and visual to auditory SSDs on brain plasticity, cortical processing, and the achievement of certain forms of spatial competence. The comparison of performances between CB and sighted people using several different sensory substitution devices in perceptual and sensory-motor tasks uncovered the striking ability of the brain to rewire itself during perceptual learning and to interpret novel sensory information even during adulthood. We discuss here the implications of these findings for helping blind people in navigation tasks and to increase their accessibility to both real and virtual environments.
Highlights
Several different mechanisms influence the development of the congenitally blind brain
When learning an environment in the virtual world CB participants are able to create a mental map of this the acquired spatial knowledge from real to virtual mazes in the same manner as the sighted. They can transfer Chebat et al, 2017). These results indicate that even if certain specific spatial abilities are deficient in the case of congenital blindness, the resulting deficit in navigation still remains purely perceptual (Vecchi et al, 2004; Amedi et al, 2005), and not as previously suggested a cognitive deficit
The hippocampal and parietal cortices are two regions that are traditionally viewed as being related to spatial tasks (Poucet et al, 2003) since they are involved in the processing (Rodriguez, 2010) and in the encoding (Whitlock et al, 2008) of high level spatio-cognitive information, which is crucial for navigation
Summary
Several different mechanisms influence the development of the congenitally blind brain. Neuroimaging techniques show that brain structures devoted to vision are greatly affected (Kupers and Ptito, 2014; Fine and Park, 2018; Singh et al, 2018), and that the extensive use of the remaining senses (e.g., touch or/and audition) helps blind people to develop a set of impressive skills in various cognitive tasks, probably due to the triggering of neural plasticity mechanisms (Schinazi et al, 2016) These enhanced behavioral performances are correlated to brain plasticity using various types of SSDs (Chebat et al, 2018a). About 55% of the entire cortex is in some way responsive to visual information, and in humans it is about 35% This cortical space is by no means wasted for people who are blind from birth, and can be recruited in a variety of cognitive and spatial tasks using the remaining intact senses. The last two strategies, cyclical and perimetry to the object, that require an allocentric representation, can only be used by blind people once they have become familiar with the environment using the other strategies
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