at it since the strength of it can relate to the abilities of the other senses. Due to this, there are difficulties in people to recover eyesight when the crossmodal plasticity may have taken over the occipital cortex’s ability to analyze vision. In this study, a case study was done on a 47-year-old woman to determine if she was eligible for the study.
KL, the woman, had many visual issues in her childhood and early married life including a lazy left eye (left alone from this study), dense bilateral cataracts (a surgery was done and failed) and rhegmatogenous retinal detachment (twice). Later on, she received corneal grafting which was rejected by the eyes twice. In 2012, she received a Boston keratoprosthesis in her right eye as well as a contact lens with optical correction and glasses which is when the experiment was done. In the actual study, KL was tested three times in behavior, MRI and fMRI procedures: three weeks before the Boston keratophosthesis surgery, 1.5 months after, and seven months after. In the behavioral procedure, KL completed tasks that evaluated her “distance visual acuity, contrast sensitivity function, global motion detection, …and face individuation abilities.” fMRI scans were done after four different experiments that tested motion and face localizer as well as auditory experiments. MRI scans were done over time to look at structural changes after tasks. In this study, the control group consisted of three middle age right-handed women who had corrected-to-normal vision, who underwent the behavior experiments. For the MRI scans, the control group was nine normal sighted people who had two MRI scans done in a range of 35 days and 3.5 years. For the fMRI scans, a variety of number of people
with normal/corrected to normal vision were used to do the different experiments in the fMRI part of the study. Results from the behavioral experiments showed that from the first session to the third session, KL’s visual acuity increased in the right eye and remained untestable in the left eye, her contrast sensitivity increased between the first two sessions and then leveled off. Her global motion stayed stable throughout and was relatively the same as control group in the radial condition but worse in the vertical condition. In the face categorization and individuation task, KL did just as well as the control subjects after the surgery and significantly poorly before. From the MRI scans, it was found that gray matter density increased in the occipital regions after the surgery. In the fMRI experiments, KL’s target detection performance stayed high (>90%) throughout the study. The fMRI scans showed that beta parameter estimates increased in both static and motion responses in all parts of the brain. In the auditory experiments, KL did relatively the same in the first two sessions but improved in the third session and it was seen that her occipital regions were consistently being active. KL’s visual abilities were greatly improved after the Boston keratoprosthesis surgery which as seen in various behavioral experiments in the study. The idea of crossmodal reorganization and consistent functional specialization was debunked since KL showed that the reorganization of the neurons was more like those of late-onset blind people rather than early-onset blind people. In addition, it was seen that the primary visual cortex remained the same in the processing of nonvisual information even though there was vision restoration. Despite this, gray matter density increased as soon as 1.5 months after the surgery. These are the results of this research study. From this article, I learned that people can restore eyesight even if they had visual problems since childhood. I also learned that crossmodal reorganization went on after the vision restoration even if most of the person’s life was in blindness. This means that the passage of time is irrelevant and even someone who was blind since childhood can have a chance in seeing again. I think that the impact of this study will increase the number of people who may be eligible for possible vision restoring eye surgeries around the world and the use of fMRI scans before surgery to enhance eligibility for vision restoration surgery.