Citation

Crollen V, Lazzouni L, Rezk M, Bellemare A, Lepore F, Collignon O. J. Neurosci. 2017; 37(42): 10097-10103.

Affiliation

Centre de Recherche en Neuropsychologie et Cognition (CERNEC), Université de Montréal, H2V 2S9 Montreal, Canada.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2017, Society for Neuroscience)

DOI

10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1213-17.2017

PMID

28947578

Abstract

Localizing touch relies on the activation of skin-based and externally defined spatial frames of references. Psychophysical studies have demonstrated that early visual deprivation prevents the automatic remapping of touch into external space. We used fMRI to characterize how visual experience impacts on the brain circuits dedicated to the spatial processing of touch. Sighted and congenitally blind humans performed a tactile temporal order judgment (TOJ) task, either with the hands uncrossed or crossed over the body midline. Behavioral data confirmed that crossing the hands has a detrimental effect on TOJ judgments in sighted but not in early blind people. Crucially, the crossed hand posture elicited enhanced activity, when compared to the uncrossed posture, in a fronto-parietal network in the sighted group only. Psychophysiological interaction analysis revealed, however, that the congenitally blind showed enhanced functional connectivity between parietal and frontal regions in the crossed versus uncrossed hand postures. Our results demonstrate that visual experience scaffolds the neural implementation of the location of touch in space.SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENTIn daily life, we seamlessly localize touch in external space for action planning toward a stimulus making contact with the body. For efficient sensori-motor integration, the brain has therefore to compute the current position of our limbs in the external world. In the present study, we demonstrate that early visual deprivation alters the brain activity in a dorsal parieto-frontal network typically supporting touch localization in the sighted. Our results therefore conclusively demonstrate the intrinsic role developmental vision plays in scaffolding the neural implementation of touch perception.

Copyright © 2017 the authors.

Language: en