News Finding: "The dramatic findings of essentially normal perceptual behavior and normal (albeit rearranged) neural correlates... attest to the power of plasticity of the higher-order visual system," Behrmann and colleagues conclude.
Paper Finding: In category-selective visual cortices, however, object-and sceneselective regions in the intact left hemisphere were stable early on, but regions subserving face and word recognition emerged later and evinced competition for cortical representation.
News Context: The fMRI results over the three-year followup indicated that the left side of his occipital lobe had continued to handle word processing while gradually reorganizing to pick up the slack on facial recognition--a task typically dominated by the right side of the lobe. "The dramatic findings of essentially normal perceptual behavior and normal (albeit rearranged) neural correlates... attest to the power of plasticity of the higher-order visual system," Behrmann and colleagues conclude. While the surgery and reorganization was a triumph for UD--who has also been seizure free since the procedure--the researchers note his case raises a host of new questions.
Paper Context: showed age-appropriate intellectual performance and visuoperceptual face and object recognition skills. In category-selective visual cortices, however, object-and sceneselective regions in the intact left hemisphere were stable early on, but regions subserving face and word recognition emerged later and evinced competition for cortical representation. These findings reveal alterations in the selectivity and topography of category-selective regions when confined to a single hemisphere and provide insights into dynamic functional changes in extrastriate cortical architecture.