Department of Medical Neurobiology, The Institute for Medical Research Israel-Canada, Faculty of Medicine, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem 91220, Israel.
Cereb Cortex. 2012 Jul;22(7):1698-709. doi: 10.1093/cercor/bhr253. Epub 2011 Sep 21.
A key question in sensory perception is the role of experience in shaping the functional architecture of the sensory neural systems. Here we studied dependence on visual experience in shaping the most fundamental division of labor in vision, namely between the ventral "what" and the dorsal "where and how" processing streams. We scanned 11 fully congenitally blind (CB) and 9 sighted individuals performing location versus form identification tasks following brief training on a sensory substitution device used for artificial vision. We show that the dorsal/ventral visual pathway division of labor can be revealed in the adult CB when perceiving sounds that convey the relevant visual information. This suggests that the most important large-scale organization of the visual system into the 2 streams can develop even without any visual experience and can be attributed at least partially to innately determined constraints and later to cross-modal plasticity. These results support the view that the brain is organized into task-specific but sensory modality-independent operators.
感觉感知中的一个关键问题是经验在塑造感觉神经系统的功能结构中的作用。在这里，我们研究了视觉经验对塑造视觉中最基本的分工的依赖性，即腹侧“什么”和背侧“在哪里和如何”处理流之间的分工。我们扫描了 11 名完全先天性失明（CB）和 9 名视力正常的个体，在使用用于人工视觉的感觉替代设备进行短暂训练后，进行位置与形式识别任务。我们表明，当感知传达相关视觉信息的声音时，CB 成人中可以揭示出背/腹视觉通路的分工。这表明，即使没有任何视觉经验，视觉系统最重要的大规模组织也可以发展为两个流，并且至少部分归因于先天决定的约束和后来的跨模态可塑性。这些结果支持了大脑组织成特定任务但与感觉模态无关的操作符的观点。
