What is the balance between nature and nurture in determining the function of cortical areas? A key way to answer this question is by studying people with congenital deprivation. What plasticity is evident when a brain area is deprived from birth of its typical input or outputs? And what can this reveal about the underlying processing in the typical brain? Last, do different individuals with deprivation exhibit similar patterns of plasticity, or is there diversity in how their brains adapt?
First I will present a series of studies examining the role of motor experience in the neural representations of actions in people born without hands. We found that specific hand-selective brain regions do not exclusively represent motor control of the hands; instead, they relate to the actions performed with them. These higher-level representations allow us to perform comparable actions with different body parts. Drawing parallels across insights gained from studies of individuals born blind or deaf, I’ll argue that studying such special populations allows tracking the cognitive level of representation of different brain regions and their hierarchies.
Furthermore, I will show evidence for a larger diversity of brain connectivity patterns across individuals born with blindness or deafness than typically developed individuals. These findings reveal the variability of alternative developmental trajectories for the human cortex, and its dependence on experience. Additionally, they open new questions about the functions of the deprived cortex and how it may affect the restoration of function on an individual level.
Overall, my research demonstrates how studying congenital deprivation across domains provides valuable insights into neural representations, development, and plasticity in both typical and deprived brains, and highlights potential avenues for sensory and motor restoration.
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