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Cerebral Cortex Advance Access originally published online on March 31, 2006
Cerebral Cortex 2007 17(2):457-465; doi:10.1093/cercor/bhj162
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© The Author 2006. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Functional Cerebral Reorganization for Auditory Spatial Processing and Auditory Substitution of Vision in Early Blind Subjects

Olivier Collignon1, Maryse Lassonde2, Franco Lepore2, Danielle Bastien2 and Claude Veraart1

1 Neural Rehabilitation Engineering Laboratory, Université Catholique de Louvain, Brussels, Belgium, 2 Centre de Recherche en Neuropsychologie et Cognition, Département de Psychologie, Université de Montréal, Canada

Address correspondence to Claude Veraart, Neural Rehabilitation Engineering Laboratory, Université Catholique de Louvain, Avenue Hippocrate, 54 UCL-54.46, B-1200 Brussels, Belgium. Email: veraart{at}gren.ucl.ac.be.

Early blind (EB) individuals can recognize bidimensional shapes using a prosthesis substituting vision with audition (PSVA) and activate right dorsal extrastriate visual cortex during the execution of this task. The present study used repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) to further examine the functional role of this structure in the successful use of the PSVA. Moreover, we investigated which auditory parameter used in the prosthesis (pitch, intensity, or spatial location) might contribute to this occipital activation. Results revealed that rTMS applied to right dorsal extrastriate cortex in EB subjects interferes with both the PSVA use and the auditory spatial location task but not with pitch and intensity discriminations. By contrast, rTMS targeting the same cortical areas in sighted subjects did not affect performance on any auditory tasks. Early visual deprivation thus leads to functional cerebral cross-modal reorganization in the processing of auditory information and auditory-to-visual sensory substitution. The findings also point to the specific involvement of the dorsal visual stream for auditory spatial processing in blind subjects. Moreover, this suggests that sensory substitution prostheses can be developed using these additional neural resources to perform tasks that partially compensate for the loss of vision.

Key Words: blindness • occipital cortex • plasticity • sensory substitution • transcranial magnetic stimulation


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