Amedi Amir, Floel Agnes, Knecht Stefan, Zohary Ehud, Cohen Leonardo G
Neurobiology Department, Life Science Institute and Interdisciplinary Center for Neural Computation, Hebrew University, Jerusalem 91904, Israel.
Nat Neurosci. 2004 Nov;7(11):1266-70. doi: 10.1038/nn1328. Epub 2004 Oct 3.
Recent neuroimaging studies in blind persons show that the occipital cortex, including the primary visual cortex (V1), is active during language-related and verbal-memory tasks. No studies, however, have identified a causal link between early visual cortex activity and successful performance on such tasks. We show here that repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) of the occipital pole reduces accuracy on a verb-generation task in blind subjects, but not in sighted controls. An analysis of error types revealed that the most common error produced by rTMS was semantic; phonological errors and interference with motor execution or articulation were rare. Thus, in blind persons, a transient 'virtual lesion' of the left occipital cortex interferes with high-level verbal processing
近期针对盲人的神经影像学研究表明，枕叶皮质，包括初级视觉皮质（V1），在与语言相关及言语记忆任务期间处于活跃状态。然而，尚无研究确定早期视觉皮质活动与此类任务的成功表现之间存在因果关系。我们在此表明，对枕极进行重复经颅磁刺激（rTMS）会降低盲人在动词生成任务中的准确性，但对视力正常的对照者则无此影响。对错误类型的分析显示，rTMS产生的最常见错误是语义性的；语音错误以及对运动执行或发音的干扰很少见。因此，在盲人中，左侧枕叶皮质的短暂“虚拟损伤”会干扰高级言语加工。
