Advances in pediatric eye-care have yielded treatments for many causes of childhood blindness such as congenital cataracts. However, merely treating the eyes is not sufficient for ensuring restoration of normal visual function. An equally important requirement for sight recovery is that a child's brain be able to correctly process the visual information. Currently, we have little experimental data about how well the human brain can recover visual function after extended periods of visual deprivation, and how we can compensate for any impairments. The data that do exist are either from anecdotal case studies, or pertain to individuals with relatively short periods of deprivation, ranging from a few weeks to months. Furthermore, past studies have focused primarily on low-level aspects of visual function such as acuity and contrast sensitivity. We have limited knowledge of the influence of long-term visual deprivation on """"""""high-level"""""""" skills such as object recognition. We propose to undertake a collaborative project with selected eye-hospitals in India with the goal of investigating the time-course of development of object-perception skills in children across a wide agespectrum following treatment for congenital blindness. We shall focus on face-perception skills, since they are of great importance for mediating inter-personal interactions and, thereby, for enabling a child's social adjustment. Using psychophysics and EEG/ERP recordings, our studies will seek to experimentally characterize the nature and extent of face-perception impairments and to determine the processing deficiencies that may cause the observed impairments. Results from this project will have implications for several fundamental issues in neuroscience such as the amount of visual experience needed for attaining proficiency, the image information used, and critical periods, if any, for specific face perception skills. ? ?
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