Ruhr University Bochum, Faculty of Psychology, D-44780, Bochum, Germany; Leibniz Research Centre for Working Environment and Human Factors, Dortmund, Germany.
Eur J Neurosci. 2013 Oct;38(8):3201-9. doi: 10.1111/ejn.12306. Epub 2013 Jul 17.
Blindness induces processes of neural plasticity, resulting in recruitment of the deafferentated visual areas for non-visual sensory functions. These processes are related to superior abilities of blind compared with sighted individuals for specific auditory and tactile tasks. Recently, an exceptional performance of the blind has been demonstrated for auditory motion perception, with a minimum audible movement angle that was half that of sighted controls (J. Lewald (2013) Neuropsychologia, 51, 181-186). The present study revealed an electrophysiological correlate of this finding by analysing the so-called motion-onset response, a prominent auditory-evoked potential to the onset of motion. The cN1 component of this response, appearing about 170 ms after motion onset, was two times higher in amplitude for blind compared with matched sighted control subjects. At the time of the cN1, electrical neuroimaging using sLORETA revealed stronger activation in blind than sighted subjects primarily in ventral visual areas (V1v, V2v, VP, V4v) of the right occipital lobe. Activation was also obtained in middle temporal area V5. These findings suggest that blindness results in stronger involvement of both non-motion areas of the ventral visual stream and motion areas of the dorsal visual stream in processing of auditory motion at the same point in time after motion onset. This argues against the view that visual motion areas, such as area V5, are preferentially recruited for auditory motion analysis in the blind. Rather, cross-modal reorganization of cortical areas induced by blindness seems to be largely independent of the specific visual functions of the same areas in sighted persons.
失明会诱导神经可塑性过程，从而使去传入的视觉区域被招募用于非视觉感觉功能。这些过程与盲人在特定的听觉和触觉任务中相对于视力正常者的卓越能力有关。最近，盲人在听觉运动感知方面表现出了非凡的能力，其最小可听运动角度是视力正常对照组的一半（J. Lewald（2013）Neuropsychologia，51，181-186）。本研究通过分析所谓的运动起始反应，即运动起始时的一种突出的听觉诱发电位，揭示了这一发现的一个电生理相关性。该反应的 cN1 成分在运动起始后约 170 毫秒出现，其幅度在盲人中比在匹配的视力正常对照组中高两倍。在 cN1 时，使用 sLORETA 的电神经影像学显示，与视力正常者相比，盲人右侧枕叶的腹侧视觉区域（V1v、V2v、VP、V4v）的激活强度更高。在中颞区 V5 也获得了激活。这些发现表明，失明导致在听觉运动起始后相同时间内，腹侧视觉流的非运动区域和背侧视觉流的运动区域更多地参与了听觉运动的处理。这与视觉运动区域（如 V5 区）在盲人中更优先用于听觉运动分析的观点相矛盾。相反，由失明引起的皮质区域的跨模态重组似乎在很大程度上与视力正常者相同区域的特定视觉功能无关。
