H2020Индивидуална стипендия2020–2025

THE CROSSMODAL BRAIN · Neural mechanisms of crossmodal activity in blind and sighted individuals

„Хоризонт 2020“ — Действия „Мария Склодовска-Кюри“

Период: 2020-02-15 → 2025-08-14
Финансиране от ЕС: 162 806 €
Участници: 1
Схема: MSCA-IF

Линиите свързват координатора с партньорите.

Накратко на български

Първичният зрителен кортекс при слепите хора се активира при възприемане на звуци, например при слушане на реч. Разбирането на тази гъвкавост на мозъка може да помогне за подобряване на рехабилитацията и технологиите за хора със сензорни увреждания.

Този кратък обзор е генериран от изкуствен интелект

Кратко обяснение, генерирано от езиков модел по текста на CORDIS. Оригиналът е по-долу.

Резултати накратко

Neural mechanisms of crossmodal activity in blind and sighted individuals

The primary visual cortex is traditionally considered a brain region exclusively dedicated to visual processing. Decades of research have focused on understanding its organization and role in visual perception. However, recent studies involving individuals who have been blind since birth challenge this conventional understanding. They reveal that, in the absence of visual input, the primary visual cortex is actively engaged during perception in other sensory modalities, such as hearing. This neuroscience project aimed to investigate how the primary visual cortex is recruited during non-visual processing in blind individuals and to explore the functional relevance of this activity. Specifically, it examined whether auditory language perception is mediated by long-range cortico-cortical, multisensory, or mental imagery-based mechanisms in both blind and sighted participants. The societal relevance of this research lies in its potential to advance our understanding of brain reorganization, offering new avenues for innovations in rehabilitation and assistive technology for individuals with sensory impairments. The project combined scientific and training objectives. The scientific goal was to provide experimental evidence supporting neural models of crossmodal activity in congenitally blind and sighted individuals. The training goals were to deepen knowledge in neuroplasticity and ultra-high-field MRI, while simultaneously fostering technical proficiency and management skills. Although the project faced delays due to pandemic-related disruptions and recruitment challenges, it successfully established a data processing pipeline and generated foundational data that can inform future research.

Текст от CORDIS, на английски · Данни: CORDIS, © Европейски съюз

Цел на проекта

Our ability to learn rests on the brain’s capacity to change. People who are blind since birth have to rely more strongly on the intact sense, hearing and touch, to interact with their environment. As a consequence, blind people often show superior abilities when it comes to discriminating sounds and touch. For example, they can distinguish different voices more easily. The blind brain shows large changes due to the lack of vision: the part of the brain that responds to visual input in sighted people is now activated by the processing of sounds and touch, which is called “crossmodal plasticity”. Not only blind people, but also sighted people sometimes show crossmodal activation of the visual cortex while perceiving sounds or touch. As many environmental events are multisensory in nature, e.g. we simultaneously see and hear a person, it is thought that all related sensory representations are activated in distributed networks across the brain – even if only one sensory input is received. The proposed project investigates, using the latest advances in ultra-high field imaging, the detailed underlying mechanisms of crossmodal activation of visual brain regions during voice perception in blind and sighted humans in order to understand how the brain adapts to experience.

Оригинален текст от CORDIS (на английски).

Участници

UNIVERSITY OF HAMBURG · HamburgКоординаторГермания