Dataset Information

A morphometric analysis of auditory brain regions in congenitally deaf adults.

ABSTRACT: We investigated whether variation in auditory experience in humans during development alters the macroscopic neuroanatomy of primary or auditory association cortices. Volumetric analyses were based on MRI data from 25 congenitally deaf subjects and 25 hearing subjects, all right-handed. The groups were matched for gender and age. Gray and white matter volumes were determined for the temporal lobe, superior temporal gyrus, Heschl's gyrus (HG), and the planum temporale. Deaf and hearing subjects did not differ in the total volume or the gray matter volume of HG, which suggests that auditory deafferentation does not lead to cell loss within primary auditory cortex in humans. However, deaf subjects had significantly larger gray matter-white matter ratios than hearing subjects in HG, with deaf subjects exhibiting significantly less white matter in both left and right HG. Deaf subjects also had higher gray matter-white matter ratios in the rest of the superior temporal gyrus, but this pattern was not observed for the temporal lobe as a whole. These findings suggest that auditory deprivation from birth results in less myelination and/or fewer fibers projecting to and from auditory cortices. Finally, the volumes of planum temporale and HG were significantly larger in the left hemisphere for both groups, suggesting that leftward asymmetries within "auditory" cortices do not arise from experience with auditory processing.

SUBMITTER: Emmorey K

PROVIDER: S-EPMC187761 | biostudies-literature | 2003 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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A morphometric analysis of auditory brain regions in congenitally deaf adults.

Emmorey Karen K Allen John S JS Bruss Joel J Schenker Natalie N Damasio Hanna H

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 20030806 17

We investigated whether variation in auditory experience in humans during development alters the macroscopic neuroanatomy of primary or auditory association cortices. Volumetric analyses were based on MRI data from 25 congenitally deaf subjects and 25 hearing subjects, all right-handed. The groups were matched for gender and age. Gray and white matter volumes were determined for the temporal lobe, superior temporal gyrus, Heschl's gyrus (HG), and the planum temporale. Deaf and hearing subjects d ...[more]

PMID: 12904582

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Project description:Congenital deafness modifies an individual's daily interaction with the environment and alters the fundamental perception of the external world. How congenital deafness shapes the interface between the internal and external worlds remains poorly understood. To interact efficiently with the external world, visuospatial representations of external target objects need to be effectively transformed into sensorimotor representations with reference to the body. Here, we tested the hypothesis that egocentric body-centred sensorimotor transformation is impaired in congenital deafness. Consistent with this hypothesis, we found that congenital deafness induced impairments in egocentric judgements, associating the external objects with the internal body. These impairments were due to deficient body-centred sensorimotor transformation per se, rather than the reduced fidelity of the visuospatial representations of the egocentric positions. At the neural level, we first replicated the previously well-documented critical involvement of the frontoparietal network in egocentric processing, in both congenitally deaf participants and hearing controls. However, both the strength of neural activity and the intra-network connectivity within the frontoparietal network alone could not account for egocentric performance variance. Instead, the inter-network connectivity between the task-positive frontoparietal network and the task-negative default-mode network was significantly correlated with egocentric performance: the more cross-talking between them, the worse the egocentric judgement. Accordingly, the impaired egocentric performance in the deaf group was related to increased inter-network connectivity between the frontoparietal network and the default-mode network and decreased intra-network connectivity within the default-mode network. The altered neural network dynamics in congenital deafness were observed for both evoked neural activity during egocentric processing and intrinsic neural activity during rest. Our findings thus not only demonstrate the optimal network configurations between the task-positive and -negative neural networks underlying coherent body-centred sensorimotor transformations but also unravel a critical cause (i.e. impaired body-centred sensorimotor transformation) of a variety of hitherto unexplained difficulties in sensory-guided movements the deaf population experiences in their daily life.

Project description:Emotions are commonly recognized by combining auditory and visual signals (i.e., vocal and facial expressions). Yet it is unknown whether the ability to link emotional signals across modalities depends on early experience with audio-visual stimuli. In the present study, we investigated the role of auditory experience at different stages of development for auditory, visual, and multisensory emotion recognition abilities in three groups of adolescent and adult cochlear implant (CI) users. CI users had a different deafness onset and were compared to three groups of age- and gender-matched hearing control participants. We hypothesized that congenitally deaf (CD) but not early deaf (ED) and late deaf (LD) CI users would show reduced multisensory interactions and a higher visual dominance in emotion perception than their hearing controls. The CD (n = 7), ED (deafness onset: <3 years of age; n = 7), and LD (deafness onset: >3 years; n = 13) CI users and the control participants performed an emotion recognition task with auditory, visual, and audio-visual emotionally congruent and incongruent nonsense speech stimuli. In different blocks, participants judged either the vocal (Voice task) or the facial expressions (Face task). In the Voice task, all three CI groups performed overall less efficiently than their respective controls and experienced higher interference from incongruent facial information. Furthermore, the ED CI users benefitted more than their controls from congruent faces and the CD CI users showed an analogous trend. In the Face task, recognition efficiency of the CI users and controls did not differ. Our results suggest that CI users acquire multisensory interactions to some degree, even after congenital deafness. When judging affective prosody they appear impaired and more strongly biased by concurrent facial information than typically hearing individuals. We speculate that limitations inherent to the CI contribute to these group differences.

Dataset Information

A morphometric analysis of auditory brain regions in congenitally deaf adults.

Publications

A morphometric analysis of auditory brain regions in congenitally deaf adults.

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