Cross-Modal Brain Plasticity in Congenital Blindness: Lessons from the Tongue Display Unit
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
The tongue display unit (TDU) is a sensory substitution device that translates visual information into electrotactile stimulation that is applied to the tongue. Blind subjects can learn to use the TDU in various visual tasks, including orientation, motion and shape identification, and spatial navigation. We used the TDU in conjunction with brain imaging techniques in order to study the cerebral correlates of cross-modal brain plasticity. The results show that when blind subjects use the TDU to perform visual tasks that are known to activate the dorsal and ventral visual streams in the sighted, they activate the same brain areas. This suggests that motion and shape processing are organized in a supramodal manner in the human brain and that vision is not necessary for the development of the functional architecture in motion and shape processing areas. We also used the TDU in spatial navigation tasks. The results showed that blind but not blindfolded sighted subjects activated their visual cortex and right parahippocampus during navigation, suggesting that in the absence of vision, cross-modal plasticity permits the recruitment of the same cortical network used for spatial navigation tasks in sighted subjects.
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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 | 0.001 |
| 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 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
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 it