ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2017
Emergence of categorical face perception after extended early-onset blindness.
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 25 papers.
What it found
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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.
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Who cites it
25 citing papers in PubMed, 44 citations in OpenAlex.
- Seeing anew: Mechanisms, outcomes, and challenges in adapting to restored sight via visual prostheses.Progress in retinal and eye research · 2026Review
- Longitudinal Changes in Nystagmus Following Late Treatment for Congenital Blindness.Investigative ophthalmology & visual science · 2026Article
- Impact of a transient neonatal visual deprivation on the development of the ventral occipito-temporal cortex in humans.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Gray matter abnormalities in sight deprivation and sight restoration.Brain structure & function · 2025Article
- Article
- The Status of Vernier Acuity Following Late Sight Onset.Developmental science · 2025Article
- Motion's privilege in recognizing facial expressions following treatment for blindness.Current biology : CB · 2024Article
- Pattern-reversal visual evoked potentials in prosthetic vision and simulated visual reduction.BMJ open ophthalmology · 2024Article
- Face-specific identification impairments following sight-providing treatment may be alleviated by an initial period of low visual acuity.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Butterfly effects in perceptual development: a review of the 'adaptive initial degradation' hypothesis.Developmental review : DR · 2024Article
- Project Prakash: Merging Basic Science and Societal Service in Vision Research.Policy insights from the behavioral and brain sciences · 2023Article
- Lab Meets World: the Case for Use-Inspired Basic Research in Affective Science.Affective science · 2023Review
- White matter plasticity following cataract surgery in congenitally blind patients.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Vulnerability of facial attractiveness perception to early and multi-year visual deprivation.Developmental science · 2023Article
- Head turning is an effective cue for gaze following: Evidence from newly sighted individuals, school children and adults.Neuropsychologia · 2022Article
- Congenitally blind adults can learn to identify face-shapes via auditory sensory substitution and successfully generalize some of the learned features.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Face shape processingFrontiers in neuroscience · 2022Article
- Scholastic status of congenitally blind children following sight surgery.International journal of special education · 2022Article
- Learning to see after early and extended blindness: A scoping review.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
- Early life experience sets hard limits on motor learning as evidenced from artificial arm use.eLife · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
5 authors at 3 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
Abstract
It is unknown whether the ability to visually distinguish between faces and nonfaces is subject to a critical period during development. Would a congenitally blind child who gains sight several years after birth be able to acquire this skill? This question has remained unanswered because of the rarity of cases of late sight onset. We had the opportunity to work with five early-blind individuals who gained sight late in childhood after treatment for dense bilateral cataracts. We tested their ability to categorize patterns as faces, using natural images that spanned a spectrum of face semblance. The results show that newly sighted individuals are unable to distinguish between faces and nonfaces immediately after sight onset, but improve markedly in the following months. These results demonstrate preserved plasticity for acquiring face/nonface categorization ability even late in life, and set the stage for investigating the informational and neural basis of this skill acquisition.
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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.