Development of vision following late emergence from congenital blindness

先天性失明晚醒后视力发育

• 批准号: 282667715
• 负责人: Professor Dr. Marc Ernst
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: Institut für Psychologie und Pädagogik
• 依托单位国家: 德国
• 项目类别: DIP Programme
• 财政年份: 2016
• 资助国家: 德国
• 起止时间: 2015-12-31 至 2023-12-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://gepris.dfg.de/gepris/projekt/282667715?language=en
• 关键词: Development; vision; following; late; emergence

Consider the following: you've been blind from birth for years and the image of the external world has never reached your retina. Suddenly, this obstacle is removed. What exactly will you be able you see? Can you visually recognize everyday objects? Will an object (e.g. a ball) that you've easily recognized through touch, be immediately recognized from its newly seen visual image. This is the famous philosophical question put by Molyneux in the 17th century, to which we still do not have a full answer. Recently, Sinha and colleagues [1] have addressed this issue directly by studying children with congenital cataract, who were surgically treated only years after birth. Their results suggest that visual-tactile matching is not immediate, but can be established within days after surgery. However, the general issue of visual learning under these conditions is far from being understood. Other studies on sight recovery show that some aspects of learning to see properly are very difficult, if not impossible, if sight is recovered late in life [2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10]. Even though some initial studies have been conducted with sight-recovered children and adults, we still lackboth a detailed empirical knowledge, as well as a theoretical understanding, of what are the possibilities and limitations of sight-recovery, which can guide visual learning and rehabilitation. For example, we wish to know, whether there are critical periods for the learning process. Can sight-recovery patients learn to use their vision in order to understand different aspects of their physical environment, recognize objects, the actions of other people, and social interactions between people? How is sight-recovery similar to, and different from, normal visual learning in infancy and early childhood? Can visual cues used in infant learning be adapted to guide sight-recovery? Is action required for learning? What is the contribution of the other sensory modalities in recovering visual perception? For example, will sight-recovered children easily recognize views of hands and other body parts, which they have been using all along, and to what degree can these children use their hands to perform visually guided actions? More generally, is haptic experience enough to generate an internal model of the visual object? And if there is a multimodal representation, does this require massive learning to integrate the information available from the unimodal representations? Is an object representation unique for each sensory modality, or is there also a multimodal representation of the object? Questions like these probe the core of perception and its acquisition, and are fundamental to our understanding of how perception and cognitions are formed. Sight-recovery offers a unique perspective to study them. (...)

考虑以下情况：你从出生就失明多年，外部世界的图像从未到达你的视网膜。突然间，这个障碍消失了。你到底能看到什么？你能从视觉上认出日常用品吗？一个物体（例如一个球），你可以很容易地通过触摸识别，你会立即从它的新视觉图像中识别出来吗？这是Molyneux在17世纪提出的著名哲学问题，我们至今仍未找到完整的答案。最近，Sinha和他的同事通过研究先天性白内障患儿直接解决了这个问题，先天性白内障患儿在出生几年后就接受了手术治疗。他们的研究结果表明，视觉与触觉的匹配并不是立竿见影的，但可以在手术后几天内建立起来。然而，在这些条件下视觉学习的一般问题还远远没有被理解。其他关于视力恢复的研究表明，如果在生命的后期恢复视力，学习正确地看东西的某些方面是非常困难的，如果不是不可能的话[2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10]。尽管对视力恢复的儿童和成人进行了一些初步的研究，但我们仍然缺乏详细的经验知识，以及对视力恢复的可能性和局限性的理论理解，这可以指导视觉学习和康复。例如，我们想知道，学习过程中是否存在关键时期。视力恢复的病人能否学会运用他们的视力来理解周围环境的不同方面，识别物体、他人的行为以及人与人之间的社会互动？视力恢复与婴幼儿期正常的视觉学习有何相似之处，又有何不同？婴儿学习中使用的视觉线索是否可以用于指导视力恢复？学习需要行动吗？在恢复视觉知觉的过程中，其他感觉模式的作用是什么？例如，视力恢复的孩子是否容易识别他们一直使用的手和其他身体部位的视图，这些孩子在多大程度上可以使用他们的手进行视觉引导的动作？更一般地说，触觉体验是否足以产生视觉对象的内部模型？如果有一个多模态表征，这是否需要大量的学习来整合单模态表征提供的信息？每个感官模态都有一个独特的物体表征，还是物体也有一个多模态表征？像这样的问题探究了感知及其获取的核心，是我们理解感知和认知如何形成的基础。视力恢复为研究它们提供了一个独特的视角。（…)