The fine-scale functional correlation of striate cortex in sighted and blind people

OH Butt, NC Benson, R Datta… - Journal of …, 2013 - Soc Neuroscience
Journal of Neuroscience, 2013Soc Neuroscience
To what extent are spontaneous neural signals within striate cortex organized by vision? We
examined the fine-scale pattern of striate cortex correlations within and between
hemispheres in rest-state BOLD fMRI data from sighted and blind people. In the sighted, we
find that corticocortico correlation is well modeled as a Gaussian point-spread function
across millimeters of striate cortical surface, rather than degrees of visual angle. Blindness
produces a subtle change in the pattern of fine-scale striate correlations between …
To what extent are spontaneous neural signals within striate cortex organized by vision? We examined the fine-scale pattern of striate cortex correlations within and between hemispheres in rest-state BOLD fMRI data from sighted and blind people. In the sighted, we find that corticocortico correlation is well modeled as a Gaussian point-spread function across millimeters of striate cortical surface, rather than degrees of visual angle. Blindness produces a subtle change in the pattern of fine-scale striate correlations between hemispheres. Across participants blind before the age of 18, the degree of pattern alteration covaries with the strength of long-range correlation between left striate cortex and Broca's area. This suggests that early blindness exchanges local, vision-driven pattern synchrony of the striate cortices for long-range functional correlations potentially related to cross-modal representation.
Soc Neuroscience