Neural basis of Braille literacy in blind adults and children

Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore MD

Investigators

Linked publications, trials & patents

Abstract

PROJECT SUMMARY The proposed diversity supplement application is intended to support Ms. Zaida McClinton in her training as a cognitive neuroscientist investigating brain plasticity. Ms. McClinton is a highly talented and well-trained student completing her undergraduate degree in Neuroscience at Johns Hopkins University. The proposed supplement will support her in obtaining a master’s in Neuroscience and conducting a year-and-a-half of mentored research in my laboratory working on the neural basis of Braille reading in congenitally blind adults. I will mentor Ms. McClinton while she designs, carries out, analyzes, presents and publishes this neuroscience work on Braille reading. The grant will support her as she acquires critical skills in cognitive neuroscience, including fMRI analysis and TMS, and give her the edge she needs to enter a high-quality MD-PhD program and provide preliminary data for an NRSA F30 application. During the proposed supplement Ms. McClinton will conduct a series of studies that build on and are complementary to the parent award but are not redundant with it. Ms. McClinton will use the already collected fMRI data to conduct fMRI-guided TMS studies that test the cognitive and behavioral contributions of the posterior parietal (PPC) and ventral occipito-temporal (vOTC) cortical circuits to Braille reading. The goals of the parent award are to discover whether people who are born blind develop ‘tactile word form’ representations in the PPC and to test the role of the vOTC in Braille reading for blind adults and compare its contribution to that of the PPC. Ms. McClinton will first test the behavioral relevance of the PPC and vOTC to reading using fMRI guided TMS, which has never been done before. Next, she will test the timing of the contribution of these regions. We hypothesize that PPC performs form-based orthographic processing, and is therefore involved earlier, whereas vOTC performs more high- level language functions and is therefore involved later. These experiments are highly complementary to the goals of the parent award, which will dissociate the contributions of these regions to Braille reading. Finally, closing the loop and answering the question of why the vOTC is active during Braille reading, Ms. McClinton will test whether vOTC is relevant to high-level linguistic processing in blindness. The proposed work is highly theoretically significant and complementary to the parent proposal since TMS gives us an opportunity to test behavioral relevance of activation observed with fMRI and to thus inform theories of Braille reading and plasticity in blindness. We anticipate that the proposed experiments will lead to 3 or 4 first author publications providing an intensive manuscript preparation experience. This opportunity will enable Ms. McClinton to learn cutting edge cognitive neuroscience skills and propel her into a career as a cognitive physician- neuroscientist investigating brain plasticity.