article

Early cross-modal plasticity in adults

Authors:

Maria Concetta Morrone,

Claudia LunghiAuthors Info & Claims

Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, Volume 29, Issue 3

Pages 520 - 529

https://doi.org/10.1162/jocn_a_01067

Published: 01 March 2017 Publication History

Abstract

It is known that, after a prolonged period of visual deprivation, the adult visual cortex can be recruited for nonvisual processing, reflecting cross-modal plasticity. Here, we investigated whether cross-modal plasticity can occur at short timescales in the typical adult brain by comparing the interaction between vision and touch during binocular rivalry before and after a brief period of monocular deprivation, which strongly alters ocular balance favoring the deprived eye. While viewing dichoptically two gratings of orthogonal orientation, participants were asked to actively explore a haptic grating congruent in orientation to one of the two rivalrous stimuli. We repeated this procedure before and after 150 min of monocular deprivation. We first confirmed that haptic stimulation interacted with vision during rivalry promoting dominance of the congruent visuo-haptic stimulus and that monocular deprivation increased the deprived eye and decreased the nondeprived eye dominance. Interestingly, after deprivation, we found that the effect of touch did not change for the nondeprived eye, whereas it disappeared for the deprived eye, which was potentiated after deprivation. The absence of visuo-haptic interaction for the deprived eye lasted for over 1 hr and was not attributable to a masking induced by the stronger response of the deprived eye as confirmed by a control experiment. Taken together, our results demonstrate that the adult human visual cortex retains a high degree of cross-modal plasticity, which can occur even at very short timescales.

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Cited By

Mai XLin JWang HTao ZWang YYan STong XYu JWang BZhou ZZhao QGao SZhang WCai JKankanhalli MPrabhakaran BBoll SSubramanian RZheng LSingh VCesar PXie LXu D(2024)All rivers run into the sea: Unified Modality Brain-Inspired Emotional Central MechanismProceedings of the 32nd ACM International Conference on Multimedia10.1145/3664647.3681228(632-641)Online publication date: 28-Oct-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3664647.3681228

Early cross-modal plasticity in adults
1. Human-centered computing

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cover image Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience

Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience Volume 29, Issue 3

March 2017

179 pages

ISSN:0898-929X

EISSN:1530-8898

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MIT Press

Cambridge, MA, United States

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Published: 01 March 2017

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Cited By

Mai XLin JWang HTao ZWang YYan STong XYu JWang BZhou ZZhao QGao SZhang WCai JKankanhalli MPrabhakaran BBoll SSubramanian RZheng LSingh VCesar PXie LXu D(2024)All rivers run into the sea: Unified Modality Brain-Inspired Emotional Central MechanismProceedings of the 32nd ACM International Conference on Multimedia10.1145/3664647.3681228(632-641)Online publication date: 28-Oct-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3664647.3681228

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