relation: http://eprints.imtlucca.it/2884/
title: Increased BOLD Variability in the Parietal Cortex and Enhanced Parieto-Occipital Connectivity during Tactile Perception in Congenitally Blind Individuals
creator: Leo, Andrea
creator: Bernardi, Giulio
creator: Handjaras, Giacomo
creator: Bonino, Daniela
creator: Ricciardi, Emiliano
creator: Pietrini, Pietro
subject: RC0321 Neuroscience. Biological psychiatry. Neuropsychiatry
description: Previous studies in early blind individuals posited a possible role of parieto-occipital connections in conveying nonvisual information to the visual occipital cortex. As a consequence of blindness, parietal areas would thus become able to integrate a greater amount of multimodal information than in sighted individuals. To verify this hypothesis, we compared fMRI-measured BOLD signal temporal variability, an index of efficiency in functional information integration, in congenitally blind and sighted individuals during tactile spatial discrimination and motion perception tasks. In both tasks, the BOLD variability analysis revealed many cortical regions with a significantly greater variability in the blind as compared to sighted individuals, with an overlapping cluster located in the left inferior parietal/anterior intraparietal cortex. A functional connectivity analysis using this region as seed showed stronger correlations in both tasks with occipital areas in the blind as compared to sighted individuals. As BOLD variability reflects neural integration and processing efficiency, these cross-modal plastic changes in the parietal cortex, even if described in a limited sample, reinforce the hypothesis that this region may play an important role in processing nonvisual information in blind subjects and act as a hub in the cortico-cortical pathway from somatosensory cortex to the reorganized occipital areas.
publisher: Hindawi Publishing Corporation
date: 2012
type: Article
type: PeerReviewed
format: application/pdf
language: en
rights: cc_by_nc
identifier: http://eprints.imtlucca.it/2884/1/720278%20%281%29.pdf
identifier:   Leo, Andrea and Bernardi, Giulio and Handjaras, Giacomo and Bonino, Daniela and Ricciardi, Emiliano and Pietrini, Pietro  Increased BOLD Variability in the Parietal Cortex and Enhanced Parieto-Occipital Connectivity during Tactile Perception in Congenitally Blind Individuals.  Neural plasticity, 2012.  p. 720278.  ISSN 2090-5904      (2012)  
relation: http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2012/720278
relation: 10.1155/2012/720278