visual advantage in deaf adults linked to retinal changes在成年聋人与视网膜视觉优势的变化.pdfVIP

Visual Advantage in Deaf Adults Linked to Retinal Changes 1 2 3 3 3 3 Charlotte Codina *, Olivier Pascalis , Chris Mody , Peter Toomey , Jill Rose , Laura Gummer , David Buckley1 ´ 1 Academic Unit of Ophthalmology and Orthoptics, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, United Kingdom, 2 Laboratoire de Psychologie et NeuroCognition, Universite Pierre Mendes France, Grenoble, France, 3 Department of Ophthalmic Imaging, Sheffield Teaching Hospitals Trust, Sheffield, United Kingdom Abstract The altered sensory experience of profound early onset deafness provokes sometimes large scale neural reorganisations. In particular, auditory-visual cross-modal plasticity occurs, wherein redundant auditory cortex becomes recruited to vision. However, the effect of human deafness on neural structures involved in visual processing prior to the visual cortex has never been investigated, either in humans or animals. We investigated neural changes at the retina and optic nerve head in profoundly deaf (N = 14) and hearing (N = 15) adults using Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT), an in-vivo light interference method of quantifying retinal micro-structure. We compared retinal changes with behavioural results from the same deaf and hearing adults, measuring sensitivity in the peripheral visual field using Goldmann perimetry. Deaf adults had significantly larger neural rim areas, within the optic nerve head in comparison to hearing controls suggesting greater retinal ganglion cell number. Deaf adults also dem