Evidence for both compensatory plastic and disuse atrophy-related neuroanatomical changes in the blind
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The behavioural and neurofunctional consequences of blindness are becoming increasingly well established, and it has become evident that the amount of reorganization is directly linked to the behavioural adaptations observed in the blind. However investigations of potential neuroanatomical changes resulting from blindness have yielded conflicting results as to the nature of the observed changes, because apparent loss of occipital tissue is difficult to reconcile with observed functional recruitment. To address this issue we used two complementary brain measures of neuroanatomy, voxel-based morphometry and magnetization transfer imaging, with the latter providing insight into myelin concentration through the magnetization transfer ratio. Both early and late blind, as well as sighted control subjects participated in the study and were tested on a series of auditory and tactile tasks to provide behavioural data that we could relate to neuroanatomy. The behavioural findings show that the early blind outperform the sighted in four of five tasks, whereas the late blind do so for only one. Moreover, correlations between the auditory and tactile performance of early blind individuals seem to indicate that they might benefit from some general-purpose compensatory plasticity mechanisms, as opposed to modality-specific ones. Neuroanatomical findings reveal three key findings: (i) occipital regions in the early blind have higher magnetization transfer ratio and grey matter concentration than in the sighted; (ii) behavioural performance of the blind is strongly predicted by magnetization transfer ratio and grey matter concentration in different occipital regions; and (iii) lower grey matter and white matter concentration was also found in other occipital areas in the early blind compared to the sighted. We thus show a clear dissociation between anatomical changes that are direct result of sensory deprivation and consequent atrophy, and those related to compensatory reorganization and behavioural adaptations. Moreover, the magnetization transfer ratio results also suggest that one mechanism for this reorganization may be related to increased myelination of intracortical neurons, or perhaps of fibres conveying information to and from remote locations.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".