Fengler Ineke, Nava Elena, Röder Brigitte
Biological Psychology and Neuropsychology, Faculty of Psychology and Human Movement Science, Institute for Psychology, University of Hamburg Hamburg, Germany.
Biological Psychology and Neuropsychology, Faculty of Psychology and Human Movement Science, Institute for Psychology, University of Hamburg Hamburg, Germany ; Department of Psychology, University of Milan-Bicocca Milan, Italy ; NeuroMI Milan Center for Neuroscience Milan, Italy.
Front Integr Neurosci. 2015 Apr 22;9:31. doi: 10.3389/fnint.2015.00031. eCollection 2015.
Several studies have suggested that neuroplasticity can be triggered by short-term visual deprivation in healthy adults. Specifically, these studies have provided evidence that visual deprivation reversibly affects basic perceptual abilities. The present study investigated the long-lasting effects of short-term visual deprivation on emotion perception. To this aim, we visually deprived a group of young healthy adults, age-matched with a group of non-deprived controls, for 3 h and tested them before and after visual deprivation (i.e., after 8 h on average and at 4 week follow-up) on an audio-visual (i.e., faces and voices) emotion discrimination task. To observe changes at the level of basic perceptual skills, we additionally employed a simple audio-visual (i.e., tone bursts and light flashes) discrimination task and two unimodal (one auditory and one visual) perceptual threshold measures. During the 3 h period, both groups performed a series of auditory tasks. To exclude the possibility that changes in emotion discrimination may emerge as a consequence of the exposure to auditory stimulation during the 3 h stay in the dark, we visually deprived an additional group of age-matched participants who concurrently performed unrelated (i.e., tactile) tasks to the later tested abilities. The two visually deprived groups showed enhanced affective prosodic discrimination abilities in the context of incongruent facial expressions following the period of visual deprivation; this effect was partially maintained until follow-up. By contrast, no changes were observed in affective facial expression discrimination and in the basic perception tasks in any group. These findings suggest that short-term visual deprivation per se triggers a reweighting of visual and auditory emotional cues, which seems to possibly prevail for longer durations.
多项研究表明，健康成年人的短期视觉剥夺可引发神经可塑性。具体而言，这些研究提供了证据，表明视觉剥夺会可逆地影响基本感知能力。本研究调查了短期视觉剥夺对情绪感知的长期影响。为此，我们让一组年龄与非剥夺对照组匹配的年轻健康成年人进行3小时的视觉剥夺，并在视觉剥夺前后（即平均8小时后和4周随访时）对他们进行视听（即面部和声音）情绪辨别任务测试。为了观察基本感知技能水平的变化，我们还采用了简单的视听（即短音爆和闪光）辨别任务以及两种单峰（一种听觉和一种视觉）感知阈值测量方法。在这3小时期间，两组都进行了一系列听觉任务。为了排除在黑暗中停留3小时期间因接触听觉刺激而导致情绪辨别变化的可能性，我们对另一组年龄匹配的参与者进行了视觉剥夺，这些参与者同时进行与后来测试能力无关的（即触觉）任务。两组视觉剥夺者在视觉剥夺期后，在面部表情不一致的情况下，情感韵律辨别能力增强；这种效果在随访时部分得以维持。相比之下，任何一组在情感面部表情辨别和基本感知任务方面均未观察到变化。这些发现表明，短期视觉剥夺本身会引发视觉和听觉情感线索的重新加权，这种情况似乎可能会持续更长时间。
