This award was provided as part of NSF's Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences (SBE) Postdoctoral Research Fellowships (SPRF) program and SBE's Cognitive Neuroscience program. The goal of the SPRF program is to prepare promising, early career doctoral-level scientists for scientific careers in academia, industry or private sector, and government. SPRF awards involve two years of training under the sponsorship of established scientists and encourage Postdoctoral Fellows to perform independent research. NSF seeks to promote the participation of scientists from all segments of the scientific community, including those from underrepresented groups, in its research programs and activities; the postdoctoral period is considered to be an important level of professional development in attaining this goal. Each Postdoctoral Fellow must address important scientific questions that advance their respective disciplinary fields. Under the sponsorship of Marina Bedny, Janice Chen, and Uri Hasson at Johns Hopkins University, this postdoctoral fellowship award supports an early career scientist studying the functional flexibility of the human brain, and the ways in which an individual's experiences during development can shape cortical specialization. In particular, this project investigates the principles that govern neural plasticity and development of the visual cortex in blind people. The proposed research uses functional neuroimaging to study the neuronal response properties of the visual cortices across different blind individuals. To investigate whether the visual cortices of blind people are sensitive to a wide range of non-visual input, the proposed experiments will measure neural activity while blind and sighted individuals listen to naturalistic, narrative auditory stimuli, such as stories and movie clips, that contain varying degrees of low-level, sensory information versus high-level, abstract content. This research has the potential to advance our understanding of the mechanisms of neural plasticity and brain development, and the findings from this work may inform future treatments of visual impairments.
The proposed research aims to determine the functional flexibility of the human brain by investigating how brain function is shaped by sensory experience. The occipital lobes of the human brain, which typically support visual processing in sighted individuals, respond to touch and sound in individuals who are born without vision. However, the mechanisms driving this plasticity and its implications for theories of human brain function remain elusive and disputed. To probe whether the visual cortex of blind individuals is sensitive to both high-level, semantic and low level, sensory features of auditory input, these experiments employ functional neuroimaging to measure neural activity while individuals listen to naturalistic auditory stimuli. In addition, to compare the brains of different blind individuals, and to relate the observed functions to the sighted brain, the proposed research applies inter-subject, brain-to-brain neuroimaging analyses. The first analysis will address whether the visual cortex exhibits reliably similar response profiles across different blind individuals. To further characterize responses in blind visual cortex, the second analysis tests whether blind visual cortex performs similar computations to functional networks that are observed in the sighted brain. The third analysis tests how early life experience shapes brain development by comparing the functions of visual cortex in individuals who are born blind to those who lost their vision in adulthood. This work has the potential to make important contributions to theories of brain development, particularly regarding the developmental time course and the potential for functional specialization in cortex. Outside of blindness, these studies may serve as a general model for understanding how experiential factors drive brain plasticity during development. Such findings will also advance our knowledge of how the functions of neural tissue can be optimized or re-purposed across the lifespan.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
