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Download The effect of visual experience on the development of the mirror
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Visual experience is not necessary for the development of the mirror neuron system in the human brain Emiliano Ricciardi Laboratory of Clinical Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, University of Pisa Medical School, Pisa, Italy A particular class of visuomotor neurons in humans, discovered originally in the monkey premotor cortex and called mirror neurons, discharges both when subjects perform a goal-directed action and when they observe another individual performing a similar action. Furthermore, several pieces of evidence support the existence of a particular subclass of mirror neurons, defined auditory-visual mirror neurons (AV-MNS), that allows to understand the actions of other individuals by hearing the sound of a specific action (Gazzola et al., Curr Biol, 2006). A crucial question is whether this activity in the AV-MNS is merely mediated by a visual imagery representation of a given action or is truly engaged by auditory perception. To address this question we investigated brain response to visual and/or auditory perception of different stimuli in sighted and congenitally blind individuals. Using an fMRI (GE Signa 1.5 Tesla scanner) sparse sampling block design we examined neural activity in 7 congenitally blind and 12 sighted right-handed healthy volunteers while they were presented with action/environmental sounds or movies, and performed an odd-ball motor testing paradigm. Both congenitally blind and sighted individuals during the listening (and the observation for sighted only) of actions performed by others activated a left lateralized network including the superior and middle temporal gyri, the inferior parietal lobule and the inferior frontal premotor cortex. These results indicate that sighted and congenitally blind subjects similarly activate the AVMNS, and suggest that visual experience is not a necessary prerequisite for the development of the neural functional architecture for action recognition of other individuals. These findings further expand previous data indicating that representation of the external world relies on supramodal cortical association areas (Pietrini, this symposium) and may contribute to explain why individuals who have had no visual experience interact effectively with the surrounding environment. Neural correlates of mental representation of space in sighted and blind individuals Daniela Bonino Laboratory of Clinical Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, University of Pisa Medical School, Pisa, Italy Visual perception and visual imagery share common cortical regions within the parietal lobes. The extrastriate cortex of the dorsal pathway for spatial localization can process stimuli independently from the sensory modality that conveys the information to the brain and thus appears to be organized in a supramodal fashion. Here we tested the hypothesis that the neural mechanisms that subserve spatial imagery also might be supramodal in nature. We used fMRI (GE Signa 1.5 Tesla scanner) to examine neural activity in 10 sighted and 7 congenitally blind right-handed healthy volunteers while they performed a modified version of the mental clock task in three distinct conditions. During an auditory condition, subjects were asked to imagine two analogue clock faces showing the times that were indicated verbally, and to judge in which case the clock hands formed the wider angle. During the visual and tactile angle discrimination conditions, participants compared pairs of clock faces presented visually or tactilely and decided which hand set formed the wider angle. During the auditory imagery condition, both the sighted and congenitally blind individuals showed significant activations in posterior parietal areas, including the intraparietal sulcus and the inferior parietal lobule. These same areas showed significant activations also during the tactile and visual angle discrimination conditions. As expected, auditory, visual and tactile primary sensory regions also were activated during the respective conditions. Ventral occipital brain areas additionally were recruited in blind as compared to sighted subjects during both the tactile and auditory tasks. Both spatial discrimination and spatial imagery representation occur in the posterior parietal extrastriate cortex also when spatial stimuli are not visual in nature. This may also explain how people who have had no visual experience are able to form appropriate mental spatial representations about their surroundings, and thus interact effectively with the environment.