Impact of Congenital Visual Impairment on Early-Life Exploration: Behavioral Analysis of Temporal and Motor Parameters During a Reach-to-Grasp Playful Task.

Reach-to-grasp behavior is a key developmental milestone in infants, involving coordinated actions such as arm transport, hand pre-shaping, and hand opening and closing. Vision guides the development of these skills, and delays in visual input can impact infants with early visual impairments. However, the effects of a congenital visual impairment on reach-to-grasp behavior in early life remain largely unexplored.

Investigating the impact of the years of blindness on sleep rhythms, dream patterns, and spatial abilities: The BLINDREAM protocol.

Sleep health is a topic of great interest in recent years. However, it is still often undervalued in vulnerable populations, such as those with sensory disorders. A higher percentage of blind individuals experience circadian disorders, and their dreams have different sensory contents.

Impact of white noise on spatial navigation of people without visual cues.

The current study examines how multisensory cues-specifically, passive proprioception combined with white noise-affect navigation ability in the absence of visual input. The main goal was to investigate whether adding white noise, as a non-structured auditory stimulus, could enhance spatial learning and navigation in blindfolded sighted participants. Using a novel motion-tracking technology, SensFloor[Formula: see text], participants completed navigation tasks under two conditions: a unisensory condition (passive proprioceptive cues only) and a multisensory condition (proprioception + white noise).

Cross-Modal Interactions and Movement-Related Tactile Gating: The Role of Vision.

Background: When engaging with the environment, multisensory cues interact and are integrated to create a coherent representation of the world around us, a process that has been suggested to be affected by the lack of visual feedback in blind individuals. In addition, the presence of voluntary movement can be responsible for suppressing somatosensory information processed by the cortex, which might lead to a worse encoding of tactile information.

Objectives: In this work, we aim to explore how cross-modal interaction can be affected by active movements and the role of vision in this process.

Hand and foot overestimation in visually impaired human adults.

Previous research has shown that visual impairment results in reduced audio, tactile and proprioceptive ability. One hypothesis is that these issues arise from inaccurate body representations. Few studies have investigated metric body representations in a visually impaired population.

Corrigendum: How path integration abilities of blind people change in different exploration conditions.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.3389/fnins.2024.

How path integration abilities of blind people change in different exploration conditions.

For animals to locate resources and stay safe, navigation is an essential cognitive skill. Blind people use different navigational strategies to encode the environment. Path integration significantly influences spatial navigation, which is the ongoing update of position and orientation during self-motion.

Sensorimotor Oscillations in Human Infants during an Innate Rhythmic Movement.

The relationship between cerebral rhythms and early sensorimotor development is not clear. In recent decades, evidence revealed a rhythmic modulation involving sensorimotor processing. A widely corroborated functional role of oscillatory activity is to coordinate the information flow across sensorimotor networks.

Disambiguating vision with sound.

An important task for the visual system is to identify and segregate objects from background. Figure-ground illusions, such as Edgar Rubin's bistable 'vase-faces illusion', make the point clearly: we see either a central vase or lateral faces, alternating spontaneously, but never both images simultaneously. The border is perceptually assigned to either faces or vase, which become figure, the other shapeless background.

Blindness affects the developmental trajectory of the sleeping brain.

Sleep plays a crucial role in brain development, sensory information processing, and consolidation. Sleep spindles are markers of these mechanisms as they mirror the activity of the thalamocortical circuits. Spindles can be subdivided into two groups, slow (10-13 Hz) and fast (13-16 Hz), which are each associated with different functions.

Sensation seeking correlates with increased white matter integrity of structures associated with visuospatial processing in healthy adults.

Introduction: The ability to process sensory information is an essential adaptive function, and hyper- or hypo-sensitive maladaptive profiles of responses to environmental stimuli generate sensory processing disorders linked to cognitive, affective, and behavioral alterations. Consequently, assessing sensory processing profiles might help research the vulnerability and resilience to mental disorders. The research on neuroradiological correlates of the sensory processing profiles is mainly limited to the young-age population or neurodevelopmental disorders.

Movement-related tactile gating in blindness.

When we perform an action, self-elicited movement induces suppression of somatosensory information to the cortex, requiring a correct motor-sensory and inter-sensory (i.e. cutaneous senses, kinesthesia, and proprioception) integration processes to be successful.

The effect of visuo-haptic exploration on the development of the geometric cross-sectioning ability.

Cross-sectioning is a shape understanding task where the participants must infer and interpret the spatial features of three-dimensional (3D) solids by depicting their internal two-dimensional (2D) arrangement. An increasing body of research provides evidence of the crucial role of sensorimotor experience in acquiring these complex geometrical concepts. Here, we focused on how cross-sectioning ability emerges in young children and the influence of multisensory visuo-haptic experience in geometrical learning through two experiments.

μ-band desynchronization in the contralateral central and central-parietal areas predicts proprioceptive acuity.

Introduction: Position sense, which belongs to the sensory stream called proprioception, is pivotal for proper movement execution. Its comprehensive understanding is needed to fill existing knowledge gaps in human physiology, motor control, neurorehabilitation, and prosthetics. Although numerous studies have focused on different aspects of proprioception in humans, what has not been fully investigated so far are the neural correlates of proprioceptive acuity at the joints.

Computational modeling of human multisensory spatial representation by a neural architecture.

Our brain constantly combines sensory information in unitary percept to build coherent representations of the environment. Even though this process could appear smooth, integrating sensory inputs from various sensory modalities must overcome several computational issues, such as recoding and statistical inferences problems. Following these assumptions, we developed a neural architecture replicating humans' ability to use audiovisual spatial representations.

Effects of audio-motor training on spatial representations in long-term late blindness.

Vision plays a pivotal role in the development of spatial representation. When visual feedback is absent, complex spatial representations are impaired and temporal properties of auditory information are used by blind people to build spatial maps. Specifically, late blind (LB) adults that have spent more than 20 years without vision (i.

Multisensory representations of space and time in sensory cortices.

Clear evidence demonstrated a supramodal organization of sensory cortices with multisensory processing occurring even at early stages of information encoding. Within this context, early recruitment of sensory areas is necessary for the development of fine domain-specific (i.e.

Time in schizophrenia: a link between psychopathology, psychophysics and technology.

It has been widely demonstrated that time processing is altered in patients with schizophrenia. This perspective review delves into such temporal deficit and highlights its link to low-level sensory alterations, which are often overlooked in rehabilitation protocols for psychosis. However, if temporal impairment at the sensory level is inherent to the disease, new interventions should focus on this dimension.

Motor Influence in Developing Auditory Spatial Cognition in Hemiplegic Children with and without Visual Field Disorder.

Spatial representation is a crucial skill for everyday interaction with the environment. Different factors seem to influence spatial perception, such as body movements and vision. However, it is still unknown if motor impairment affects the building of simple spatial perception.

The vision of dreams: from ontogeny to dream engineering in blindness.

Unlabelled: The mechanisms involved in the origin of dreams remain one of the great unknowns in science. In the 21st century, studies in the field have focused on 3 main topics: functional networks that underlie dreaming, neural correlates of dream contents, and signal propagation. We review neuroscientific studies about dreaming processes, focusing on their cortical correlations.

Auditory distance perception in front and rear space.

The distance of sound sources relative to the body can be estimated using acoustic level and direct-to-reverberant ratio cues. However, the ability to do this may differ for sounds that are in front compared to behind the listener. One reason for this is that vision, which plays an important role in calibrating auditory distance cues early in life, is unavailable for rear space.

RoMAT: Robot for Multisensory Analysis and Testing of visual-tactile perceptual functions.

The present work aims to introduce a novel robotic platform suitable for investigating perception in multi-sensory motion tasks for individuals with and without sensory and motor disabilities. The system, called RoMAT, allows the study of how multisensory signals are integrated, taking into account the speed and direction of the stimuli. It is a robotic platform composed of a visual and tactile wheel mounted on two routable plates to be moved under the finger and the visual observation of the participants.

Reduced flash lag illusion in early deaf individuals.

When a brief flash is quickly presented aligned with a moving target, the flash typically appears to lag behind the moving stimulus. This effect is widely known in the literature as a flash-lag illusion (FLI). The flash-lag is an example of a motion-induced position shift.

Multisensory spatial perception in visually impaired infants.

Congenitally blind infants are not only deprived of visual input but also of visual influences on the intact senses. The important role that vision plays in the early development of multisensory spatial perception (e.g.