1. Neuroscience

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

  1. Irene Senna  Is a corresponding author
  2. Sophia Piller
  3. Itay Ben-Zion
  4. Marc O Ernst  Is a corresponding author
  1. ULM University, Germany
  2. Padeh Medical Center, Israel
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.78734
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  1. Irene Senna
  2. Sophia Piller
  3. Itay Ben-Zion
  4. Marc O Ernst
(2022)
Recalibrating vision-for-action requires years after sight restoration from congenital cataracts
eLife 11:e78734.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.78734
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Abstract

Being able to perform adept 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 sensorimotor recalibration. To this end, we assessed young individuals deprived from pattern 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 sensorimotor recalibration performance was impaired right after surgery. This finding cannot be explained by their still lower visual acuity alone, since blurring vision in controls to a matching degree did not lead to comparable behavior. Nevertheless, the recalibration ability of cataract-treated participants gradually improved with time after surgery. Thus, the lack of early pattern vision affects visuomotor recalibration. However, this ability is not lost but slowly develops after sight restoration, highlighting the importance of sensorimotor experience gained late in life.

Data availability

The full dataset including all the experimental results and the participants' demographic information has been deposited on Mendeley: doi:10.17632/ksdwxdwtxg.2. For a preview before the paper is accepted for publication, please visit: https://data.mendeley.com/datasets/ksdwxdwtxg/draft?a=6d65f8db-5a7a-4c95-8468-5dfa36ebfa71

The following data sets were generated

Article and author information

Author details

  1. Irene Senna

    Applied Cognitive Psychology, ULM University, Ulm, Germany
    For correspondence
    82irene.senna@gmail.com
    Competing interests
    The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
    ORCID icon "This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0002-3237-8193

  2. Sophia Piller

    Applied Cognitive Psychology, ULM University, Ulm, Germany
    Competing interests
    The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

  3. Itay Ben-Zion

    Pediatric Ophthalmology Service, Padeh Medical Center, Tiberias, Israel
    Competing interests
    The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

  4. Marc O Ernst

    Applied Cognitive Psychology, ULM University, Ulm, Germany
    For correspondence
    marc.ernst@uni-ulm.de
    Competing interests
    The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

Funding

Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (ER 542/3-1)

  • Marc O Ernst

The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.

Reviewing Editor

  1. Miriam Spering, The University of British Columbia, Canada

Ethics

Human subjects: The study was carried out in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki and approved by the ethics committee of the University of Bielefeld (Bielefeld University, ref. nr. EUB 2015-139). Participants, or participants' parents or legal guardians in case of minors, gave their written informed consent to participate in the study and have their data published in a journal article in an anonymous form.

Version history

  1. Received: March 17, 2022
  2. Preprint posted: April 10, 2022 (view preprint)
  3. Accepted: October 23, 2022
  4. Accepted Manuscript published: October 24, 2022 (version 1)
  5. Version of Record published: November 3, 2022 (version 2)

Copyright

© 2022, Senna et al.

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.

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  1. Irene Senna
  2. Sophia Piller
  3. Itay Ben-Zion
  4. Marc O Ernst
(2022)
Recalibrating vision-for-action requires years after sight restoration from congenital cataracts
eLife 11:e78734.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.78734

Share this article

https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.78734

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