Visual Experience Shapes the Neural Networks Remapping Touch into External Space
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Localizing touch relies on the activation of skin-based and externally defined spatial frames of reference. Psychophysical studies have demonstrated that early visual deprivation prevents the automatic remapping of touch into external space. We used fMRI to characterize how visual experience impacts the brain circuits dedicated to the spatial processing of touch. Sighted and congenitally blind humans performed a tactile temporal order judgment (TOJ) task, either with the hands uncrossed or crossed over the body midline. Behavioral data confirmed that crossing the hands has a detrimental effect on TOJ judgments in sighted but not in early blind people. Crucially, the crossed hand posture elicited enhanced activity, when compared with the uncrossed posture, in a frontoparietal network in the sighted group only. Psychophysiological interaction analysis revealed, however, that the congenitally blind showed enhanced functional connectivity between parietal and frontal regions in the crossed versus uncrossed hand postures. Our results demonstrate that visual experience scaffolds the neural implementation of the location of touch in space. SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT In daily life, we seamlessly localize touch in external space for action planning toward a stimulus making contact with the body. For efficient sensorimotor integration, the brain has therefore to compute the current position of our limbs in the external world. In the present study, we demonstrate that early visual deprivation alters the brain activity in a dorsal parietofrontal network typically supporting touch localization in the sighted. Our results therefore conclusively demonstrate the intrinsic role that developmental vision plays in scaffolding the neural implementation of touch perception.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".