Recalibrating vision-for-action requires years after sight restoration from congenital blindness

Abstract

AbstractBeing able to perform goal-directed actions requires predictive, feed-forward control, including a mapping between the visually estimated target locations and the motor commands reaching for them. When the mapping is perturbed, e.g., due to muscle fatigue or optical distortions, we are quickly able to recalibrate the sensorimotor system to update this mapping. Here we investigated whether early visual and visuomotor experience is essential for developing the ability to recalibrate. To this end, we assessed young individuals deprived from vision due to dense congenital bilateral cataracts, who were surgically treated for sight restoration only years after birth. We compared their recalibration performance to such distortion to that of age-matched sighted controls. Their recalibration performance was impaired right after surgery. This finding cannot be explained by their still lower visual acuity, since blurring vision in controls to a matching degree did not lead to comparable behavior. Nevertheless, the recalibration ability of cataract-treated participants improved with experience, matching controls’ performance after around 2 years from surgery. Thus, the lack of early visual experience affects visuomotor recalibration. However, this ability is not lost but slowly develops after sight restoration, highlighting the importance of sensorimotor experience for brain plasticity late in life.