Neural Correlates of Natural Human Echolocation in Early and Late Blind Echolocation Experts
Neural Correlates of Natural Human Echolocation in Early and Late Blind Echolocation Experts
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DOI：
10.1371/journal.pone.0020162
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发表时间：
2011-05-25
期刊：
影响因子：
3.7
通讯作者：
Goodale, Melvyn A.
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Thaler, Lore;Arnott, Stephen R.;Goodale, Melvyn A.
背景资料：一小部分盲人擅长用回声定位无声的物体，他们只需要用嘴发出咔嗒声，然后倾听返回的回声。然而，这种无需辅助的人类回声定位背后的神经结构还没有被研究过。为了解决这个问题，我们招募了回声定位专家，一个是早期失明的，一个是晚期失明的，当他们听到自己的回声定位声音时，我们测量了每个人的大脑功能活动。结果：当我们比较包含咔哒声和回声的声音的大脑活动与不包含回声的控制声音的大脑活动时，但在声学上是匹配的，我们在两个人的距状皮质中都发现了活性重要的是，对于同样的比较，我们没有观察到听觉皮层的活动差异。在早期失明，但不是晚盲的参与者，我们还发现，距活动更大的回声反射表面位于对侧空间。最后，在这两个人中，我们发现激活中颞叶和附近的皮层区域时，他们听到的回声反映从移动targets.Conclusions：这些研究结果表明，点击回声的处理招聘的大脑区域通常致力于视觉，而不是听力在早期和晚期盲回声定位专家。
Background: A small number of blind people are adept at echolocating silent objects simply by producing mouth clicks and listening to the returning echoes. Yet the neural architecture underlying this type of aid-free human echolocation has not been investigated. To tackle this question, we recruited echolocation experts, one early-and one late-blind, and measured functional brain activity in each of them while they listened to their own echolocation sounds.Results: When we compared brain activity for sounds that contained both clicks and the returning echoes with brain activity for control sounds that did not contain the echoes, but were otherwise acoustically matched, we found activity in calcarine cortex in both individuals. Importantly, for the same comparison, we did not observe a difference in activity in auditory cortex. In the early-blind, but not the late-blind participant, we also found that the calcarine activity was greater for echoes reflected from surfaces located in contralateral space. Finally, in both individuals, we found activation in middle temporal and nearby cortical regions when they listened to echoes reflected from moving targets.Conclusions: These findings suggest that processing of click-echoes recruits brain regions typically devoted to vision rather than audition in both early and late blind echolocation experts.