Development and Plasticity of Intra- and Intersensory Information Processing

By D. Polley, Andrea R. Hillock, Christopher Spankovich, Maria V Popescu, David W. Royal, Mark T. Wallace. 2008

26 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The functional architecture of sensory brain regions reflects an ingenious biological solution to the competing demands of a continually changing sensory environment. While they are malleable, they have the constancy necessary to support a stable sensory percept. How does the functional organization of sensory brain regions contend with these antithetical demands? Here we describe the functional organization of auditory and multisensory (i.e., auditory-visual) information processing in three sensory brain structures: (1) a low-level unisensory cortical region, the primary auditory cortex (A1); (2) a higher-order multisensory cortical region, the anterior ectosylvian sulcus (AES); and (3) a multisensory subcortical structure, the superior colliculus (SC), We then present a body of work that characterizes the ontogenic expression of experience-dependent influences on the operations performed by the functional circuits contained within these regions. We will present data to support the hypothesis that the competing demands for plasticity and stability are addressed through a developmental transition in operational properties of functional circuits from an initially labile mode in the early stages of postnatal development to a more stable mode in the mature brain that retains the capacity for plasticity under specific experiential conditions. Finally, we discuss parallels between the central tenets of functional organization and plasticity of sensory brain structures drawn from animal studies and a growing literature on human brain plasticity and the potential applicability of these principles to the audiology clinic.

Subfields: Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Nutrition and Dietetics, Sensory Systems

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In Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

In Nutrition and Dietetics

Mark T. Wallace

In Sensory Systems

Citations in the corpus

Perceptual training narrows the temporal window of multisensory binding (2009, background): “Although these tuning functions have been shown to be relatively static in adults even in the face of significant changes in sensory statistics (Polley et al., 2008), the coupling with a reinforcement-based signal may be sufficient to engender significant change.”
The Construct of the Multisensory Temporal Binding Window and its Dysregulation in Developmental Disabilities (2014, background): “…such that changes in the statistical structure (i.e., spatial and temporal stimulus relations) of the early sensory world result in the development of integrative properties that match these statistics (Carriere et al., 2007; Polley et al., 2008; Wallace & Stein, 2000; Wallace et al., 2004).”