Abstract

Early blindness is an excellent model system for understanding the basic principles of cortical plasticity not simply because it involves sensory deprivation, but because it requires developing a set of skills that are so very different from those of sighted individuals. In this talk, I will focus on the ability of early blind individuals to track the movement of objects in space. Understanding object 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. I will discuss two studies in detail – one that characterizes changes in how early blind individuals perceive auditory motion, and the other that examines how blindness results in cross-modal neural selectivity to auditory motion within hMT+, an area that responds to visual motion in sighted individuals. These findings highlight the remarkable ability of the human brain to adapt to altered sensory input.