Do you hear what I see? How do early blind individuals experience object motion?

Abstract

One of the most important tasks for 3D vision is tracking the movement of objects in space. The ability of early blind individuals to understand motion in the environment from noisy and unreliable auditory information is an impressive example of cortical adaptation that is only just beginning to be understood. Here, we compare visual and auditory motion processing, and discuss the effect of early blindness on the perception of auditory motion. Blindness leads to cross-modal recruitment of the visual motion area hMT+ for auditory motion processing. Meanwhile, the planum temporale, associated with auditory motion in sighted individuals, shows reduced selectivity for auditory motion. We discuss how this dramatic shift in the cortical basis of motion processing might influence the perceptual experience of motion in early blind individuals. This article is part of a discussion meeting issue ‘New approaches to 3D vision’.

New Approaches to 3D Vision

“…But how is this possible? Fine & Park [ 382 ] find that this ability relies on the auditory system adopting brain area hMT+, that's associated with visual motion processing in normal observers, but it changes the nature of the motion processing that hMT+ engages in to accommodate the low spatial resolution of auditory information.…”

Behavioral adjustment of C. elegans to mechanosensory loss requires intact mechanosensory neurons

“…Remarkably, in many such cases the nervous system is able to compensate for the sensory deficit through cross-modal plasticity [ 1 , 2 ], whereby some of the missing information is provided by remaining senses whose performance is modulated. This effect has been broadly demonstrated in humans, such as in blind people exhibiting increased auditory [ 3 ], touch [ 4 ], and olfactory [ 5 ] acuity, and in many other animals, including even the 1-mm long nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans [ 1 , 6 , 7 ] whose nervous system consists of only several hundred neurons. Cross-modal plasticity may thus help circumvent the loss of sensory information, making it possible to successfully navigate the environment despite the absence of certain sensory inputs.…”