Sensory Deprivation & Sensory Re-acquisition
Sensory Deprivation & Sensory Re-acquisition
My work addresses how sensory experience — and its absence — shapes conceptual and semantic representations in the brain.
- Auditory categories in the blind. fMRI studies revealed that the ventral occipito-temporal cortex (VOTC) encodes sound categories in both blind and sighted individuals, with congenitally blind participants showing an even stronger, “vision-like” categorical organisation (Mattioni et al., 2020).
- Neural reallocation. Early and late blindness enhance similarity between auditory representations in temporal and occipital cortices, suggesting a partial functional shift from temporal to occipital areas (Mattioni et al., 2022).
- Differential vulnerability. Using advanced multivariate fMRI and DNN modelling, we showed that even brief early visual deprivation leaves permanent traces in early visual cortex, while high-level categorical coding in VOTC remains resilient (Mattioni et al., 2024, under review).
These findings highlight the resilience of high-level semantic systems to altered experience, while revealing sensitive periods for low-level visual encoding. Beyond theory, this work informs sight restoration research and provides a rare window into brain plasticity through the study of unique populations.