Steady state evoked potentials indicate changes in nonlinear neural mechanisms of vision in sight recovery individuals.

Humans with a transient phase of congenital pattern vision deprivation have been observed to feature prevailing deficits, particularly in higher order visual functions. However, the neural correlates of these prevalent visual impairments remain unclear. To probe different visual processing stages, we measured steady state visual evoked potentials (SSVEPs) generated by luminance flicker stimuli at 6.

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.

Risk of herpes zoster in the Japanese population with immunocompromising and chronic disease conditions: Results from a claims database cohort study, from 2005 to 2014.

Older adults, women and patients with immunocompromised (IC) or chronic medical conditions have a higher incidence of herpes zoster (HZ) and are at higher risk of developing HZ-associated complications such as postherpetic neuralgia. The incidence rates of HZ in various IC and chronic conditions have been previously reported in a retrospective cohort study using claims data from Japanese adults. Here, we report further analyses from this cohort using univariate and multivariable Cox regression to estimate crude and adjusted hazard ratios (HRs) associated with different IC and chronic conditions.

Neural correlates of semantic and syntactic processing in German Sign Language.

The study of deaf and hearing native users of signed languages can offer unique insights into how biological constraints and environmental input interact to shape the neural bases of language processing. Here, we use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to address two questions: (1) Do semantic and syntactic processing in a signed language rely on anatomically and functionally distinct neural substrates as it has been shown for spoken languages? and (2) Does hearing status affect the neural correlates of these two types of linguistic processing? Deaf and hearing native signers performed a sentence judgement task on German Sign Language (Deutsche Gebärdensprache: DGS) sentences which were correct or contained either syntactic or semantic violations. We hypothesized that processing of semantic and syntactic violations in DGS relies on distinct neural substrates as it has been shown for spoken languages.

Functional Preference for Object Sounds and Voices in the Brain of Early Blind and Sighted Individuals.

Sounds activate occipital regions in early blind individuals. However, how different sound categories map onto specific regions of the occipital cortex remains a matter of debate. We used fMRI to characterize brain responses of early blind and sighted individuals to familiar object sounds, human voices, and their respective low-level control sounds.

A Brief Period of Postnatal Visual Deprivation Alters the Balance between Auditory and Visual Attention.

Is a short and transient period of visual deprivation early in life sufficient to induce lifelong changes in how we attend to, and integrate, simple visual and auditory information [1, 2]? This question is of crucial importance given the recent demonstration in both animals and humans that a period of blindness early in life permanently affects the brain networks dedicated to visual, auditory, and multisensory processing [1-16]. To address this issue, we compared a group of adults who had been treated for congenital bilateral cataracts during early infancy with a group of normally sighted controls on a task requiring simple detection of lateralized visual and auditory targets, presented alone or in combination. Redundancy gains obtained from the audiovisual conditions were similar between groups and surpassed the reaction time distribution predicted by Miller's race model.

Auditory motion in the sighted and blind: Early visual deprivation triggers a large-scale imbalance between auditory and "visual" brain regions.

How early blindness reorganizes the brain circuitry that supports auditory motion processing remains controversial. We used fMRI to characterize brain responses to in-depth, laterally moving, and static sounds in early blind and sighted individuals. Whole-brain univariate analyses revealed that the right posterior middle temporal gyrus and superior occipital gyrus selectively responded to both in-depth and laterally moving sounds only in the blind.

Long-Lasting Crossmodal Cortical Reorganization Triggered by Brief Postnatal Visual Deprivation.

Animal and human studies have demonstrated that transient visual deprivation early in life, even for a very short period, permanently alters the response properties of neurons in the visual cortex and leads to corresponding behavioral visual deficits. While it is acknowledged that early-onset and longstanding blindness leads the occipital cortex to respond to non-visual stimulation, it remains unknown whether a short and transient period of postnatal visual deprivation is sufficient to trigger crossmodal reorganization that persists after years of visual experience. In the present study, we characterized brain responses to auditory stimuli in 11 adults who had been deprived of all patterned vision at birth by congenital cataracts in both eyes until they were treated at 9 to 238 days of age.

Tracking the evolution of crossmodal plasticity and visual functions before and after sight restoration.

Visual deprivation leads to massive reorganization in both the structure and function of the occipital cortex, raising crucial challenges for sight restoration. We tracked the behavioral, structural, and neurofunctional changes occurring in an early and severely visually impaired patient before and 1.5 and 7 mo after sight restoration with magnetic resonance imaging.

Impact of blindness onset on the functional organization and the connectivity of the occipital cortex.

Contrasting the impact of congenital versus late-onset acquired blindness provides a unique model to probe how experience at different developmental periods shapes the functional organization of the occipital cortex. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to characterize brain activations of congenitally blind, late-onset blind and two groups of sighted control individuals while they processed either the pitch or the spatial attributes of sounds. Whereas both blind groups recruited occipital regions for sound processing, activity in bilateral cuneus was only apparent in the congenitally blind, highlighting the existence of region-specific critical periods for crossmodal plasticity.

Attentional shifts induced by uninformative number symbols modulate neural activity in human occipital cortex.

Number processing interacts with space encoding in a wide variety of experimental paradigms. Most intriguingly, the passive viewing of uninformative number symbols can shift visuo-spatial attention to different target locations according to the number magnitude, i.e.

Extensive visual training in adulthood significantly reduces the face inversion effect.

The poorer recognition performance for inverted as compared to upright faces is one of the most well-known and robust behavioral effects observed in the field of face perception. Here we investigated whether extensive training at individualizing a large set of inverted faces in adulthood could significantly reduce this inversion effect for novel faces. This issue is important because inverted faces are as complex as upright faces but they are not visually experienced during development.

Plasticity of the dorsal "spatial" stream in visually deprived individuals.

Studies on visually deprived individuals provide one of the most striking demonstrations that the brain is highly plastic and is able to rewire as a function of the sensory input it receives from the environment. In the current paper, we focus on spatial abilities that are typically related to the dorsal visual pathway (i.e.

Embodied numbers: the role of vision in the development of number-space interactions.

The strong association between numbers and space is found in the well-documented SNARC effect (Spatial Numerical Association of Response Codes), where responses on small/large numbers are faster in the left/right side of space, respectively. However, little is known about the developmental process through which numbers are mapped onto external physical space. Here we show that early blind individuals, but not late blind or sighted, demonstrate a reversed SNARC effect when performing a numerical comparison task with hands crossed over the body midline.

A common right fronto-parietal network for numerosity and duration processing: an fMRI study.

Numerosity and duration processing have been modeled by a functional mechanism taking the form of an accumulator working under two different operative modes. Separate investigations of their cerebral substrates have revealed partly similar patterns of activation, mainly in parietal and frontal areas. However, the precise cerebral implementation of the accumulator model within these areas has not yet been directly assessed.

Functional selectivity in sensory-deprived cortices.

In a recent study, Lomber, Meredith, and Kral (2010) investigated crossmodal reorganization in congenitally deaf cats. They demonstrated that specific regions of the auditory cortex are responsible for distinct supranormal visual performances following early auditory deprivation. These exciting results are considered in light of recently increasing research suggesting that crossmodal plasticity associated with early sensory deprivation follows organizational principles that maintain the functional specialization of the colonized brain regions.

Mode-dependent and mode-independent representations of numerosity in the right intraparietal sulcus.

In humans, areas around the intraparietal sulcus (IPS) have been found to play a crucial role in coding nonsymbolic numerosities (i.e., number of elements in a collection).