Institute of Psychology, Jagiellonian University, Krakow, Poland.
Department of Psychology and Brain Sciences, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, USA.
Nat Commun. 2024 Sep 17;15(1):8035. doi: 10.1038/s41467-024-52383-6.
Congenital deafness enhances responses of auditory cortices to non-auditory tasks, yet the nature of the reorganization is not well understood. Here, naturalistic stimuli are used to induce neural synchrony across early deaf and hearing individuals. Participants watch a silent animated film in an intact version and three versions with gradually distorted meaning. Differences between groups are observed in higher-order auditory cortices in all stimuli, with no statistically significant effects in the primary auditory cortex. Comparison between levels of scrambling revealed a heterogeneity of function in secondary auditory areas. Both hemispheres show greater synchrony in the deaf than in the hearing participants for the intact movie and high-level variants. However, only the right hemisphere shows an increased inter-subject synchrony in the deaf people for the low-level movie variants. An event segmentation validates these results: the dynamics of the right secondary auditory cortex in the deaf people consist of shorter-length events with more transitions than the left. Our results reveal how deaf individuals use their auditory cortex to process visual meaning.
先天性耳聋增强了听觉皮层对非听觉任务的反应，但重组的性质尚不清楚。在这里，使用自然刺激在早期耳聋和听力正常的个体中诱导神经同步。参与者观看无声动画电影的完整版本和三个逐渐失真的版本。在所有刺激中，除了初级听觉皮层外，在高级听觉皮层中观察到组间差异，在初级听觉皮层中没有统计学上显著的影响。在混淆水平的比较中，揭示了次级听觉区域功能的异质性。对于完整电影和高级变体，耳聋参与者的两个半球的同步性都大于听力参与者。然而，只有右半球在低水平电影变体中表现出耳聋者的跨个体同步性增加。事件分割验证了这些结果：耳聋者右侧次级听觉皮层的动态由比左侧更短长度的事件和更多的转换组成。我们的研究结果揭示了耳聋个体如何利用听觉皮层来处理视觉意义。
