ArticleNeuroImage2016
Congenital blindness is associated with large-scale reorganization of anatomical networks.
Article in NeuroImage, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 18 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
18 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- A systematic review of olfactory-related brain structural changes in patients with congenital or acquired anosmia.Brain structure & function · 2022Pooled it
- Excitatory and inhibitory networks diverge following early blindness.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2026Article
- The role of sensory experience in the maturation of prefrontal cortical circuits.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2026Review
- Association between cortical thickness and functional response to linguistic processing in the occipital cortex of early blind individuals.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2025Article
- Structural Brain Changes in Patients with Congenital Anosmia: MRI-Based Analysis of Gray- and White-Matter Volumes.Diagnostics (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Blind individuals' enhanced ability to sense their own heartbeat is related to the thickness of their occipital cortex.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2024Article
- Cortical Visual Impairment in Childhood: 'Blindsight' and the Sprague Effect Revisited.Brain sciences · 2021Review
- Brief Postnatal Visual Deprivation Triggers Long-Lasting Interactive Structural and Functional Reorganization of the Human Cortex.Frontiers in medicine · 2021Article
- Blindness, Psychosis, and the Visual Construction of the World.Schizophrenia bulletin · 2020Article
- A sensitive period in the neural phenotype of language in blind individuals.Developmental cognitive neuroscience · 2020Article
- Neural Networks Mediating Perceptual Learning in Congenital Blindness.Scientific reports · 2020Article
- Neuroplasticity in visual impairments.Neurology international · 2018Article
- How Areal Specification Shapes the Local and Interareal Circuits in a Macaque Model of Congenital Blindness.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2018Article
- Neuronal populations in the occipital cortex of the blind synchronize to the temporal dynamics of speech.eLife · 2018Article
- Autism Pathogenesis: The Superior Colliculus.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2018Article
- Emotion processing in early blind and sighted individuals.Neuropsychology · 2017Article
- Topographical functional connectivity patterns exist in the congenitally, prelingually deaf.Scientific reports · 2016Article
- Cortical Plasticity and Olfactory Function in Early Blindness.Frontiers in systems neuroscience · 2016Review
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Blindness is a unique model for understanding the role of experience in the development of the brain's functional and anatomical architecture. Documenting changes in the structure of anatomical networks for this population would substantiate the notion that the brain's core network-level organization may undergo neuroplasticity as a result of life-long experience. To examine this issue, we compared whole-brain networks of regional cortical-thickness covariance in early blind and matched sighted individuals. This covariance is thought to reflect signatures of integration between systems involved in similar perceptual/cognitive functions. Using graph-theoretic metrics, we identified a unique mode of anatomical reorganization in the blind that differed from that found for sighted. This was seen in that network partition structures derived from subgroups of blind were more similar to each other than they were to partitions derived from sighted. Notably, after deriving network partitions, we found that language and visual regions tended to reside within separate modules in sighted but showed a pattern of merging into shared modules in the blind. Our study demonstrates that early visual deprivation triggers a systematic large-scale reorganization of whole-brain cortical-thickness networks, suggesting changes in how occipital regions interface with other functional networks in the congenitally blind.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
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.