PRIN 2015
Sight has always been regarded as the most important sense for humans to interact with the surrounding world and acquire knowledge Nonetheless, individuals who are visually-deprived since birth show perceptual, cognitive and social skills that are to a great extent comparable to those found in sighted individuals. While historically research has focused mostly on the brain plastic reorganization that occurs in blind individuals, only more recently scientists from distinct labs across the world, including our own, have developed innovative strategies to understand how much vision is a mandatory prerequisite for the brain fine morphological architecture to develop and function. As a whole, the studies conducted to date in sighted and congenitally blind individuals have provided solid and novel evidence that most of the association 'visual' cortical areas develop independently from any visual experience and are able to process non-visual information as well, a property that we named supramodality.
Two of the most important questions rising on the functional features of a supramodal functional organization are:
1. Does a supramodal recruitment subserve similar mental strategies in sighted and blind?
2. How is unisensory information integrated into a supramodal, more ‘conceptual’ representation? This project will merge two multidisciplinary, integrated tasks with state-of-the-art methodological approaches to characterize the neural substrates that subtend the supramodal cortical organization and answer to these still-open questions.