Visual plasticity in the deaf: evidence from psychophysics and fMRI
Multiple Paper Presentation

Karen Dobkins
Psychology Department, UC San Diego

     Abstract ID Number: 21

Abstract
The study of deaf individuals, who have been auditorily deprived since birth, affords a unique opportunity to investigate how one sensory modality (e.g., vision) may compensate for the loss of another (audition). To investigate this issue, we use both psychophysical techniques and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to characterize differences in visual processing between deaf and hearing subjects. Our psychophysical studies reveal significant visual adaptations in deaf subjects, which appear to be due, in part, to deaf subjects’ exposure to a visual language (ASL). Complementing these psychophysical findings, our fMRI experiments reveal strong visual responses in auditory cortex of deaf subjects, suggesting that, devoid of its normal input from the ears, the developing auditory cortex comes to serve the remaining intact senses (i.e., vision).

To be Presented at the Following Symposium:
Consequences of sensory loss
Other papers in this Symposium:

• Brigitte Roeder
  Experimental and Biological Psychology, Philipps-University
  The consequences of having no vision
• K. Sathian
  Dept. of Neurology, Emory University School of Medicine, Atl
  Extrastriate visual cortical recruitment during tactile form perception in the sighted
• Lotfi B. Merabet
  Department of Neurology, Harvard Medical School
  Jessica Andrews
  Department of Neurology, Harvard Medical School
  Hugo Theoret
  Department of Neurology, Harvard Medical School
  Alvaro Pascual-Leone
  Department of Neurology, Harvard Medical School
  Investigating the role of occipital cortex in tactile processing: In search of a meta-modal brain