Abstract
Animal studies have shown that visual deprivation during the first months of life permanently impairs the interactions between sensory systems. Here we report an analogous effect for humans who had been deprived of pattern vision for at least the first five months of their life as a result of congenital binocular cataracts. These patients showed reduced audio-visual interactions in later life, although their visual performance in control tasks was unimpaired. Thus, adequate (multisensory) input during the first months of life seems to be a prerequisite in humans, as well as in animals, for the full development of cross-modal interactions.
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Acknowledgements
We are grateful to all participants; many of the individuals put in a great deal of effort to participate. We thank the Deutsche Blindenstudienanstalt Marburg, the Department of Ophthalmology at the University Hospitals Giessen and Marburg (P. Kroll) and Hamburg (G. Richard), the Westfälisches Berufskolleg fuer Blinde und Sehbehinderte Soest, and the Department of Pediatric Ophthalmology, Strabismology and Ophthalmogenetics at the University of Regensburg (B. Lorenz) for their support in recruiting participants. We thank K. Hoetting for providing the control data for Experiment 3, J. Gläscher for programming support for Experiment 2, and C. Büchel for early comments on Experiment 2. This study was supported by grants from the German Research Foundation (DFG; Ro 1226/4-2 and 4-3) to B.R.
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L.P. and B.R. designed the research and K.L. contributed a major research idea. L.P. and I.G. carried out the research, L.P. and B.R. analyzed the data and L.P., B.R. and F.R. wrote the paper.
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Putzar, L., Goerendt, I., Lange, K. et al. Early visual deprivation impairs multisensory interactions in humans. Nat Neurosci 10, 1243–1245 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1038/nn1978
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nn1978
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