ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2017
Task-specific reorganization of the auditory cortex in deaf humans.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 59 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.
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Who cites it
59 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it, 184 citations in OpenAlex.
- Research of visual attention networks in deaf individuals: a systematic review.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Pooled it
- The Cross-Modal Effects of Sensory Deprivation on Spatial and Temporal Processes in Vision and Audition: A Systematic Review on Behavioral and Neuroimaging Research since 2000.Neural plasticity · 2019Pooled it
- Differential cross-modal functional plasticity in deaf individuals: A meta-analysis of neuroimaging studies.iScience · 2026Article
- Retinotopic remapping of the visual system in deaf adults.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Vibrotactile beat sensitivity in deaf individuals: behavioral and neural evidence.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2026Article
- A multidimensional framework for dissociating the neuroplasticity of auditory and early language deprivation.Communications biology · 2026Article
- The Neural Organization of Visual Information in the Auditory Cortex of the Congenitally Deaf.Human brain mapping · 2026Article
- Action-type mapping principles extend beyond evolutionarily conserved actions, even in people born without hands.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Article
- Auditory imagery and poetry-elicited emotions: a study on the hard of hearing.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Article
- Developing a novel assistive technology, empowering the deaf to speak, using visual feedback.Journal of otology · 2025Article
- Metabolic alterations within the primary visual cortex in blind patients with end-stage glaucoma: a proton magnetic resonance spectroscopy study.Frontiers in cell and developmental biology · 2025Article
- Neural adaptations to congenital deafness: enhanced tactile discrimination through cross-modal neural plasticity - an fMRI study.Neurological sciences : official journal of the Italian Neurological Society and of the Italian Society of Clinical Neurophysiology · 2024Article
- The visual cortex in the blind but not the auditory cortex in the deaf becomes multiple-demand regions.Brain : a journal of neurology · 2024Article
- Auditory areas are recruited for naturalistic visual meaning in early deaf people.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Cortical thickness differences between hearing and perinatally deaf cats using ultra-high field MRI.Neuroimage. Reports · 2024Article
- Localizing 3D motion through the fingertips: Following in the footsteps of elephants.iScience · 2024Article
- Visual training after central retinal loss limits structural white matter degradation: an MRI study.Behavioral and brain functions : BBF · 2024Article
- Metamodal Coupling of Vibrotactile and Auditory Speech Processing Systems through Matched Stimulus Representations.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2023Article
- Crossmodal plasticity in hearing loss.Trends in neurosciences · 2023Review
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Authors and funding
7 authors at 4 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The principles that guide large-scale cortical reorganization remain unclear. In the blind, several visual regions preserve their task specificity; ventral visual areas, for example, become engaged in auditory and tactile object-recognition tasks. It remains open whether task-specific reorganization is unique to the visual cortex or, alternatively, whether this kind of plasticity is a general principle applying to other cortical areas. Auditory areas can become recruited for visual and tactile input in the deaf. Although nonhuman data suggest that this reorganization might be task specific, human evidence has been lacking. Here we enrolled 15 deaf and 15 hearing adults into an functional MRI experiment during which they discriminated between temporally complex sequences of stimuli (rhythms). Both deaf and hearing subjects performed the task visually, in the central visual field. In addition, hearing subjects performed the same task in the auditory modality. We found that the visual task robustly activated the auditory cortex in deaf subjects, peaking in the posterior-lateral part of high-level auditory areas. This activation pattern was strikingly similar to the pattern found in hearing subjects performing the auditory version of the task. Although performing the visual task in deaf subjects induced an increase in functional connectivity between the auditory cortex and the dorsal visual cortex, no such effect was found in hearing subjects. We conclude that in deaf humans the high-level auditory cortex switches its input modality from sound to vision but preserves its task-specific activation pattern independent of input modality. Task-specific reorganization thus might be a general principle that guides cortical plasticity in the brain.
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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.