Presentation
Search Abstracts | Symposia | Slide Sessions | Poster Sessions | Lightning Talks
How learning to read Braille in visual and tactile domains reorganizes the sighted brain
Poster C126 in Poster Session C, Wednesday, October 25, 10:15 am - 12:00 pm CEST, Espace Vieux-Port
Also presenting in Lightning Talks C, Wednesday, October 25, 10:00 - 10:15 am CEST, Auditorium
Maciej Gaca1, Alicja M. Olszewska1, Dawid Droździel1, Agnieszka Kulesza1, Małgorzata Paplińska3, Bartosz Kossowski1, Katarzyna Jednoróg2, Jacek Matuszewski1, Aleksandra Herman1, Artur Marchewka1; 1Laboratory of Brain Imaging, Nencki Institute of Experimental Biology of the Polish Academy of Sciences, 2Laboratory of Language Neurobiology, Nencki Institute of Experimental Biology of the Polish Academy of Sciences, 3The Maria Grzegorzewska University
Braille reading leverages cross-modal plasticity, emphasizing the brain's ability to reallocate functions across sensory domains. This plasticity engages motor and sensory areas and reaches language and cognitive centers. Specifically, in Braille-reading blind individuals, the visual cortex activates during tactile stimulation. Additionally, regions traditionally involved in visual reading, like the visual word form area (VWFA), activate during Braille reading. Despite these insights, our understanding of cross-modal plasticity requires further exploration. No study has used a complex reading task to monitor neural activity shifts during the first three months of Braille training. Since neuroplasticity can occur within days, understanding neural reorganization during early Braille learning stages is critical. Moreover, activation patterns have not been assessed in both visual and tactile domains using comparable tasks. Furthermore, implicit reading has yet to be studied in tactile Braille. These gaps underscore the need for a more in-depth examination of neural reorganization patterns during the early stages of Braille learning. Our study involved 17 people who learned Braille for 7 months and 18 passive controls. The experimental group participated in 7 sessions (1 week before the course, on the first day of the course, after 1 week of learning, after 6 weeks, after 3 months, after 7 months, and after a 3-month-long hiatus from learning). The controls were invited for 6 sessions. To go through all of the materials designed for the course, the participants had to spend at least 52.5 hours of self-practicing. Participants' Braille proficiency peaked after 7 months of learning at an average of 14.4 words in the visual domain and 6.8 in the tactile domain, emphasizing tactile modality's complexity. Using the Lexical Decision Task (LDT) in an fMRI scanner, we observed increased activity within the reading network regions, including the inferior frontal and supramarginal gyri, 1 week into learning in tactile and visual LDT. Interestingly, VWFA activation - considered an indicator of cross-modal plasticity - was not detected until six weeks into the course, suggesting that proficiency in tactile reading influences the onset of cross-modal plasticity. It is worth noting that once this activation was achieved, the peak level of VWFA engagement remained stable, even after a three-month hiatus in learning. Furthermore, implementing an implicit reading task (6-dots detection task) revealed increased neural activity within the reading network, including the VWFA, among participants learning Braille compared to their passive control counterparts. This provides novel insights into the effects of implicit reading on neural activity during tactile Braille learning. Our study explores the temporal dynamics of cross-modal plasticity during early Braille learning and shows that the VWFA activity peak occurs faster in the visual domain compared to the tactile domain. It also showed sighted subjects' ability to process Braille implicitly. These results enrich our understanding of neural adaptation mechanisms during learning. Furthermore, they underline the potential utility of employing different types of reading tasks (explicit and implicit) in future studies to provide a more comprehensive understanding of neural reorganization in processes involved in learning tactile Braille.
Topic Areas: Reading, Multisensory or Sensorimotor Integration