ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2018
Plasticity based on compensatory effector use in the association but not primary sensorimotor cortex of people born without hands.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 25 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
25 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 49 citations in OpenAlex.
- 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
- Global remapping of the sensory homunculus emerges early in childhood development.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Cortical hierarchy and aphasia severity: the sensorimotor-association gradient modulates lesion effects within language-specific networks.Communications biology · 2026Article
- Somatosensory Misalignment: Persistent Referred Sensation After Intercostal-to-Musculocutaneous Nerve Transfer.Neural plasticity · 2026Observational
- 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
- Effector selection precedes movement specification: evidence from repetition effects in motor planning.Experimental brain research · 2025Article
- Developing a novel assistive technology, empowering the deaf to speak, using visual feedback.Journal of otology · 2025Article
- Effector-specific motor simulation supplements core action recognition processes in adverse conditions.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2023Article
- Similar somatotopy for active and passive digit representation in primary somatosensory cortex.Human brain mapping · 2023Article
- Novel objects with causal event schemas elicit selective responses in tool- and hand-selective lateral occipitotemporal cortex.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2023Article
- Pulvinar Response Profiles and Connectivity Patterns to Object Domains.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2023Article
- Article
- Complex pattern of facial remapping in somatosensory cortex following congenital but not acquired hand loss.eLife · 2022Article
- The Role of Visual Experience in Individual Differences of Brain Connectivity.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2022Article
- Neural Plasticity in a French Horn Player with Bilateral Amelia.Neural plasticity · 2021Article
- Evidence for an effector-independent action system from people born without hands.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2020Article
- Review
- What Does Dorsal Cortex Contribute to Perception?Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2020Article
- Mechanistic determinants of effector-independent motor memory encoding.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2020Article
- Is an artificial limb embodied as a hand? Brain decoding in prosthetic limb users.PLoS biology · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors at 1 institution in 3 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
What forces direct brain organization and its plasticity? When brain regions are deprived of their input, which regions reorganize based on compensation for the disability and experience, and which regions show topographically constrained plasticity? People born without hands activate their primary sensorimotor hand region while moving body parts used to compensate for this disability (e.g., their feet). This was taken to suggest a neural organization based on functions, such as performing manual-like dexterous actions, rather than on body parts, in primary sensorimotor cortex. We tested the selectivity for the compensatory body parts in the primary and association sensorimotor cortex of people born without hands (dysplasic individuals). Despite clear compensatory foot use, the primary sensorimotor hand area in the dysplasic subjects showed preference for adjacent body parts that are not compensatorily used as effectors. This suggests that function-based organization, proposed for congenital blindness and deafness, does not apply to the primary sensorimotor cortex deprivation in dysplasia. These findings stress the roles of neuroanatomical constraints like topographical proximity and connectivity in determining the functional development of primary cortex even in extreme, congenital deprivation. In contrast, increased and selective foot movement preference was found in dysplasics' association cortex in the inferior parietal lobule. This suggests that the typical motor selectivity of this region for manual actions may correspond to high-level action representations that are effector-invariant. These findings reveal limitations to compensatory plasticity and experience in modifying brain organization of early topographical cortex compared with association cortices driven by function-based organization.
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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.