Department of Psychology, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, United States of America. Institute for Neuroengineering, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, United States of America. eScience Institute, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, United States of America.
J Neural Eng. 2017 Oct;14(5):051003. doi: 10.1088/1741-2552/aa795e. Epub 2017 Jun 14.
The 'bionic eye'-so long a dream of the future-is finally becoming a reality with retinal prostheses available to patients in both the US and Europe. However, clinical experience with these implants has made it apparent that the visual information provided by these devices differs substantially from normal sight. Consequently, the ability of patients to learn to make use of this abnormal retinal input plays a critical role in whether or not some functional vision is successfully regained. The goal of the present review is to summarize the vast basic science literature on developmental and adult cortical plasticity with an emphasis on how this literature might relate to the field of prosthetic vision. We begin with describing the distortion and information loss likely to be experienced by visual prosthesis users. We then define cortical plasticity and perceptual learning, and describe what is known, and what is unknown, about visual plasticity across the hierarchy of brain regions involved in visual processing, and across different stages of life. We close by discussing what is known about brain plasticity in sight restoration patients and discuss biological mechanisms that might eventually be harnessed to improve visual learning in these patients.
“仿生眼”——长久以来未来的梦想——随着视网膜假体在美国和欧洲都可供患者使用，终于成为现实。然而，这些植入物的临床经验表明，这些设备提供的视觉信息与正常视力有很大的不同。因此，患者学习利用这种异常视网膜输入的能力在是否成功恢复某些功能性视力方面起着关键作用。本综述的目的是总结关于发育和成人皮质可塑性的大量基础科学文献，重点介绍这些文献如何与假体视觉领域相关。我们首先描述了视觉假体使用者可能经历的失真和信息丢失。然后我们定义了皮质可塑性和感知学习，并描述了在涉及视觉处理的大脑区域的层次结构中，以及在不同的生命阶段，视觉可塑性的已知和未知情况。最后，我们讨论了在视力恢复患者中已知的大脑可塑性情况，并讨论了最终可能被利用来改善这些患者视觉学习的生物学机制。
