Social cognition in the blind brain: A coordinate‐based meta‐analysis

Abstract

Social cognition skills are typically acquired on the basis of visual information (e.g., the observation of gaze, facial expressions, gestures). In light of this, a critical issue is whether and how the lack of visual experience affects neurocognitive mechanisms underlying social skills. This issue has been largely neglected in the literature on blindness, despite difficulties in social interactions may be particular salient in the life of blind individuals (especially children). Here we provide a meta‐analysis of neuroimaging studies reporting brain activations associated to the representation of self and others' in early blind individuals and in sighted controls. Our results indicate that early blindness does not critically impact on the development of the “social brain,” with social tasks performed on the basis of auditory or tactile information driving consistent activations in nodes of the action observation network, typically active during actual observation of others in sighted individuals. Interestingly though, activations along this network appeared more left‐lateralized in the blind than in sighted participants. These results may have important implications for the development of specific training programs to improve social skills in blind children and young adults.

Neural substrates of spatial processing and navigation in blindness: An activation likelihood estimation meta-analysis

“…The present study adds to a growing body of research suggesting that the brain of EB and SC are similarly organized at the functional level (Proulx et al, 2014;Cecchetti et al, 2016;Arioli et al, 2021). Particularly, our ALE analysis supports the amodal spatial processing hypothesis (Loomis et al, 2012;Chebat et al, 2018a;Giudice, 2018) as it indicates that EB and SC share common neural networks mediating spatial processing of sensory information, spatial navigation, and the formation of spatial representations.…”

Overlapping and specific neural correlates for empathizing, affective mentalizing, and cognitive mentalizing: A coordinate‐based meta‐analytic study

“…We performed six distinct ALE analyses, using the GingerALE 3.0.2 software (Eickhoff et al, 2009), to identify regions consistently associated with: (1) mentalizing, (2) affective mentalizing, (3) cognitive mentalizing, (4) empathic processing, (5, 6) mentalizing and empathic processing in HCs compared with SC patients, (7, 8) mentalizing and empathic processing in autistic patients compared with HCs. We followed the analytic approach previously described by Arioli, Gianelli, et al (2020), Arioli, Ricciardi, et al (2020) and Arioli and Canessa (2019), based on Eickhoff et al (2012). Importantly, the inclusion of multiple contrasts/experiments from the same set of subjects can generate dependence across experiment maps and thus decrease the validity of meta‐analytic results.…”

Action and emotion perception in Parkinson’s disease: A neuroimaging meta-analysis

“…We used the GingerALE software 3.0.2 ( Eickhoff et al, 2009 ) to conduct a set of ALE analyses aiming at the identification of the brain areas associated with social perception in either PD patients, HC, or both groups. We followed the method described by Eickhoff et al (2012) , resulting in the same procedure reported in Arioli et al (2021) . In a first step, each of the activation coordinates derived from the selected studies, keeping separate those related to PD patients from the HC ones, was taken as the centre of a three-dimensional Gaussian probability distribution capturing the spatial uncertainty intrinsically associated with the coordinate data.…”