Oscillatory signatures of Repetition Suppression and Novelty Detection reveal altered induced visual responses in early deafness.

The ability to differentiate between repeated and novel events represents a fundamental property of the visual system. Neural responses are typically reduced upon stimulus repetition, a phenomenon called Repetition Suppression (RS). On the contrary, following a novel visual stimulus, the neural response is generally enhanced, a phenomenon referred to as Novelty Detection (ND).

EEG frequency-tagging demonstrates increased left hemispheric involvement and crossmodal plasticity for face processing in congenitally deaf signers.

In humans, face-processing relies on a network of brain regions predominantly in the right occipito-temporal cortex. We tested congenitally deaf (CD) signers and matched hearing controls (HC) to investigate the experience dependence of the cortical organization of face processing. Specifically, we used EEG frequency-tagging to evaluate: (1) Face-Object Categorization, (2) Emotional Facial-Expression Discrimination and (3) Individual Face Discrimination.