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

Abstract
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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

1. Irene Senna
(2022) Recalibrating vision-for-action requires years after sight restoration from congenital blindness
Mendeley doi:10.17632/ksdwxdwtxg.2.

https://data.mendeley.com/v1/datasets/ksdwxdwtxg/draft?a=6d65f8db-5a7a-4c95-8468-5dfa36ebfa71

Article and author information

Author details

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.

"This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0002-3237-8193
Sophia Piller

Applied Cognitive Psychology, ULM University, Ulm, Germany

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
Itay Ben-Zion

Pediatric Ophthalmology Service, Padeh Medical Center, Tiberias, Israel

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
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.

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.

Copyright

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.