ArticleScientific reports2015
Eye closure enhances dark night perceptions.
Article in Scientific reports, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 15 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
15 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- A systematic review of human odometry.Psychological research · 2024Pooled it
- Cause or effect: Altered brain and network activity in cervical dystonia is partially normalized by botulinum toxin treatment.NeuroImage. Clinical · 2019Trial
- Eyes-closed finger-tapping task for assessing visual dependence in temporal motor control in Parkinson's disease.Frontiers in neurology · 2026Article
- Sensory Reweighting System Differences on Vestibular Feedback With Increased Task Constraints in Individuals With and Without Chronic Ankle Instability.Journal of athletic training · 2024Article
- EEG Microstate as a Marker of Adolescent Idiopathic Scoliosis.IEEE open journal of engineering in medicine and biology · 2024Article
- Internal neural states influence the short-term effect of monocular deprivation in human adults.eLife · 2023Article
- Effects of various hyperopia intervention levels on male college students' gait kinematics.Frontiers in physiology · 2023Article
- Homing tasks and distance matching tasks reveal different types of perceptual variables associated with perceiving self-motion during over-ground locomotion.Experimental brain research · 2022Article
- Acoustic Stimuli Can Improve and Impair Somatosensory Perception.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2022Article
- Assessing the relative contribution of vision to odometry via manipulations of gait in an over-ground homing task.Experimental brain research · 2021Article
- EEG microstate architecture does not change during passive whole-body accelerations.Journal of neurology · 2020Article
- Exploring brain functional connectivity in rest and sleep states: a fNIRS study.Scientific reports · 2018Article
- Activation of Bilateral Secondary Somatosensory Cortex With Right Hand Touch Stimulation: A Meta-Analysis of Functional Neuroimaging Studies.Frontiers in neurology · 2018Article
- Measuring eye states in functional MRI.BMC neuroscience · 2016Article
- Functional Plasticity after Unilateral Vestibular Midbrain Infarction in Human Positron Emission Tomography.PloS one · 2016Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
We often close our eyes when we explore objects with our fingers to reduce the dominance of the visual system over our other senses. Here we show that eye closure, even in complete darkness, results in improved somatosensory perception due to a switch from visual predominance towards a somatosensory processing mode. Using a tactile discrimination task and functional neuroimaging (fMRI) data were acquired from healthy subjects with their eyes opened and closed in two environments: under ambient light and in complete darkness. Under both conditions the perception threshold decreased when subjects closed their eyes, and their fingers became more sensitive. In complete darkness, eye closure significantly increased occipital blood-oxygen-level-dependent (BOLD) activity in the somatosensory and secondary visual processing areas. This change in brain activity was associated with enhanced coupling between the sensory thalamus and somatosensory cortex; connectivity between the visual and somatosensory areas decreased. The present study demonstrates that eye closure improves somatosensory perception not merely due to the lack of visual signals; instead, the act of closing the eyes itself alters the processing mode in the brain: with eye closure the brain switches from thalamo-cortical networks with visual dominance to a non-visually dominated processing mode.
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