ArticleCerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991)2019
Sensitive Period for Cognitive Repurposing of Human Visual Cortex.
Article in Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991), 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. An erratum has been issued. Cited by 11 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.
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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
11 citing papers in PubMed, 29 citations in OpenAlex.
- Excitatory and inhibitory networks diverge following early blindness.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2026Article
- Functional reorganization of the visual cortex in blindness: a connectivity perspective.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2026Review
- Diverging patterns of plasticity in the nucleus basalis of Meynert in early- and late-onset blindness.Brain communications · 2023Article
- Article
- Calibrating Vision: Concepts and Questions.Vision research · 2022Review
- Impact of blindness onset on the representation of sound categories in occipital and temporal cortices.eLife · 2022Article
- Naturalistic stimuli reveal a sensitive period in cross modal responses of visual cortex: Evidence from adult-onset blindness.Neuropsychologia · 2022Article
- Neurodevelopment of the association cortices: Patterns, mechanisms, and implications for psychopathology.Neuron · 2021Review
- Sensitive periods in cortical specialization for language: insights from studies with Deaf and blind individuals.Current opinion in behavioral sciences · 2020Article
- Early Adversity and Critical Periods: Neurodevelopmental Consequences of Violating the Expectable Environment.Trends in neurosciences · 2020Review
- A sensitive period in the neural phenotype of language in blind individuals.Developmental cognitive neuroscience · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
- Erratum issued
Authors and funding
3 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
Studies of sensory loss are a model for understanding the functional flexibility of human cortex. In congenital blindness, subsets of visual cortex are recruited during higher-cognitive tasks, such as language and math tasks. Is such dramatic functional repurposing possible throughout the lifespan or restricted to sensitive periods in development? We compared visual cortex function in individuals who lost their vision as adults (after age 17) to congenitally blind and sighted blindfolded adults. Participants took part in resting-state and task-based fMRI scans during which they solved math equations of varying difficulty and judged the meanings of sentences. Blindness at any age caused "visual" cortices to synchronize with specific frontoparietal networks at rest. However, in task-based data, visual cortices showed regional specialization for math and language and load-dependent activity only in congenital blindness. Thus, despite the presence of long-range functional connectivity, cognitive repurposing of human cortex is limited by sensitive periods.
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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.