ArticleThe Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience2011
Tactile spatial acuity enhancement in blindness: evidence for experience-dependent mechanisms.
Article in The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience, 2011. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 71 papers.
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Who cites it
71 citing papers in PubMed, 179 citations in OpenAlex.
- Human perceptual learning is delayed by the N-methyl-D-aspartate receptor partial agonist D-cycloserine.Journal of psychopharmacology (Oxford, England) · 2021Trial
- The somatosensory temporal discrimination threshold changes after a placebo procedure.Experimental brain research · 2018Trial
- Tactile learning transfer from the hand to the face but not to the forearm implies a special hand-face relationship.Scientific reports · 2018Trial
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- Article
- Complex Three-Dimensional Rearing Environments Amplify Compensatory Plasticity Following Early Blindness.eNeuro · 2026Article
- The contribution of cross-modal sensory input to reaching and grasping in blind and sighted short-tailed opossums.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Investigating mechanoreceptor variability and morphometric proxies in Rhesus Macaques: Implications for primate precision touch studies.Anatomical record (Hoboken, N.J. : 2007) · 2026Article
- Selective Synaptic Remodeling in Rat Auditory and Visual Cortices Following Noise-Induced Permanent Hearing Loss in Adulthood.Neural plasticity · 2026Article
- The Development of Audio-Tactile Spatial Integration: Unraveling Vision's Contribution.Developmental science · 2026Article
- From Touch to Mental Imagery: The Embodied Aesthetic Experience of Late-Blind People Engaged in the Tactile Exploration of Enrico Castellani's Pseudo-Braille Surface.Culture, medicine and psychiatry · 2025Article
- Haptic Compensation in Blind People's Conceptual Representations.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2025Article
- Role of proprioception in corrective visually-guided movements: larger movement errors in both arms of a deafferented individual compared to control participants.Experimental brain research · 2024Article
- Three Sliding Probes Placed on Forelimb Skin for Proprioceptive Feedback Differentially yet Complementarily Contribute to Hand Gesture Detection and Object-Size Discrimination.Annals of biomedical engineering · 2024Article
- Universal pictures: A lithophane codex helps teenagers with blindness visualize nanoscopic systems.Science advances · 2024Article
- Relations between tactile sensitivity of the finger, arm, and cheek skin over the lifespan showing decline only on the finger.Frontiers in aging neuroscience · 2024Article
- An investigation into the effectiveness of using acoustic touch to assist people who are blind.PloS one · 2023Article
- Surgical experience and different glove wearing conditions affect tactile sensibility.Heliyon · 2022Article
- Early blindness modulates haptic object recognition.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2022Article
- Measuring the sensitivity of tactile temporal order judgments in sighted and blind participants using the adaptive psi method.Attention, perception & psychophysics · 2021Article
11 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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Authors and funding
3 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Tactile spatial acuity is enhanced in blindness, according to several studies, but the cause of this enhancement has been controversial. Two competing hypotheses are the tactile experience hypothesis (reliance on the sense of touch drives tactile-acuity enhancement) and the visual deprivation hypothesis (the absence of vision itself drives tactile-acuity enhancement). Here, we performed experiments to distinguish between these two hypotheses. We used force-controlled grating orientation tasks to compare the passive (finger stationary) tactile spatial acuity of 28 profoundly blind and 55 normally sighted humans on the index, middle, and ring fingers of each hand, and on the lips. The tactile experience hypothesis predicted that blind participants would outperform the sighted on the fingers, and that Braille reading would correlate with tactile acuity. The visual deprivation hypothesis predicted that blind participants would outperform the sighted on fingers and lips. Consistent with the tactile experience hypothesis, the blind significantly outperformed the sighted on all fingers, but not on the lips. Additionally, among blind participants, proficient Braille readers on their preferred reading index finger outperformed nonreaders. Finally, proficient Braille readers performed better with their preferred reading index finger than with the opposite index finger, and their acuity on the preferred reading finger correlated with their weekly reading time. These results clearly implicate reliance on the sense of touch as the trigger for tactile spatial acuity enhancement in the blind, and suggest the action of underlying experience-dependent neural mechanisms such as somatosensory and/or cross-modal cortical plasticity.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.