Spatial Competence and Brain Plasticity in Congenital Blindness via Sensory Substitution Devices

Large-Scale Brain Plasticity Following Blindness and the Use of Sensory Substitution Devices

Living with a sensory impairment is challenging and those who have lost the use of one sensory modality need to find ways to deal with numerous problems encountered in daily life. When vision is lost, this may include navigating through space, finding objects, recognizing people or surroundings, reading or even communicating without much access to nonverbal signs provided by others such as eye ...

Sensory Deprivation and Brain Plasticity

1 École d’Optométrie, Université de Montréal, Montréal, QC, Canada H3T 1P1 2Department of Neuroscience and Pharmacology, Faculty of Health Sciences, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark 3Danish Research Center for Magnetic Resonance, Hvidovre Hospital, DK-2650 Hvidovre, Denmark 4Department of Physiology and Pharmacology, The University of Western Ontario, London, ON, Canada N6A5K8 5Cen...

Compensatory plasticity and sensory substitution in the cerebral cortex.

Cats deprived visually from birth show few overt impairments in their natural behavior. Therefore, they seem well suited as an animal model for the study of compensatory plasticity after early vision loss. It can be demonstrated that binocularly deprived cats show improved abilities of auditory localization, and at least equal tactile behavior compared to normal controls. Within the anterior ec...

Designing sensory-substitution devices: Principles, pitfalls and potential1

An exciting possibility for compensating for loss of sensory function is to augment deficient senses by conveying missing information through an intact sense. Here we present an overview of techniques that have been developed for sensory substitution (SS) for the blind, through both touch and audition, with special emphasis on the importance of training for the use of such devices, while highli...

Congenital Blindness as an Instance of Sensory Deprivation,