Musz Elizabeth, Loiotile Rita, Chen Janice, Bedny Marina
Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Johns Hopkins University, 3400 N Charles Street, Baltimore, MD 21210, United States.
Cereb Cortex. 2022 Dec 15;33(1):1-10. doi: 10.1093/cercor/bhac048.
Occipital cortices of different sighted people contain analogous maps of visual information (e.g. foveal vs. peripheral). In congenital blindness, "visual" cortices respond to nonvisual stimuli. Do visual cortices of different blind people represent common informational maps? We leverage naturalistic stimuli and inter-subject pattern similarity analysis to address this question. Blindfolded sighted (n = 22) and congenitally blind (n = 22) participants listened to 6 sound clips (5-7 min each): 3 auditory excerpts from movies; a naturalistic spoken narrative; and matched degraded auditory stimuli (Backwards Speech, scrambled sentences), during functional magnetic resonance imaging scanning. We compared the spatial activity patterns evoked by each unique 10-s segment of the different auditory excerpts across blind and sighted people. Segments of meaningful naturalistic stimuli produced distinctive activity patterns in frontotemporal networks that were shared across blind and across sighted individuals. In the blind group only, segment-specific, cross-subject patterns emerged in visual cortex, but only for meaningful naturalistic stimuli and not Backwards Speech. Spatial patterns of activity within visual cortices are sensitive to time-varying information in meaningful naturalistic auditory stimuli in a broadly similar manner across blind individuals.
不同视力状况的人的枕叶皮质包含类似的视觉信息图谱（例如中央凹与周边）。在先天性失明中，“视觉”皮质对非视觉刺激有反应。不同盲人的视觉皮质是否代表共同的信息图谱？我们利用自然主义刺激和受试者间模式相似性分析来解决这个问题。蒙眼的视力正常者（n = 22）和先天性盲人（n = 22）参与者在功能磁共振成像扫描期间聆听6个声音片段（每个5 - 7分钟）：3个电影的听觉摘录；一段自然主义的口语叙述；以及匹配的退化听觉刺激（倒叙语音、打乱的句子）。我们比较了不同听觉摘录中每个独特的10秒片段在盲人和视力正常者中诱发的空间活动模式。有意义的自然主义刺激片段在额颞叶网络中产生了独特的活动模式，这些模式在盲人和视力正常的个体中都有共享。仅在盲人组中，特定片段的跨受试者模式出现在视觉皮质中，但仅针对有意义的自然主义刺激，而非倒叙语音。视觉皮质内的空间活动模式以大致相似的方式对有意义的自然主义听觉刺激中的随时间变化的信息敏感，这在不同盲人个体中都是如此。
