Figure 1.

Functional relevance of crossmodal plasticity. Illustrated here are demonstrations of the functional role played by the occipital cortex in spatial hearing tasks in early blind individuals. The top row (panel A) depicts the finding that occipital activity in early blind individuals (black dots) was predictive of their performance in a sound localization task (Gougoux et al., 2005). The bottom row (panel B) illustrates the effect that TMS has when applied to the occipital cortex (black bars) when both blind and sighted subjects were asked to localize sounds (Collignon et al., 2007). Compared to Sham-TMS (white bars), TMS applied over occipital cortex reduced the performance of early blind subjects only, which is indicative that this region is functionally relevant for spatial processing in the early blind. Adapted with permission from Gougoux et al. (2005) and Collignon et al. (2007). ^*P < 0.05.