11:00 - 12:30
Tue—HZ_8—Talks5—44
Tue-Talks5
Room:
Room: HZ_8
Chair/s:
Yuranny Cabral-Calderin, Alex Francois Lepauvre
Decoding residual visual processing during blindsight
Tue—HZ_8—Talks5—4403
Presented by: Yuranny Cabral-Calderin
Yuranny Cabral-Calderin 1*Lucia Melloni 1, 2, 3
1 Neural Circuits, Consciousness and Cognition Research Group, Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, 60322, Frankfurt am Main, Germany., 2 Department of Neurology, NYU Grossman School of Medicine, New York, New York, USA., 3 Predictive Brain Department, Research Center One Health Ruhr, University Alliance Ruhr, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Bochum, Germany.
It is well established that damage to the primary visual cortex does not entirely eliminate the brain's capacity for visual processing. Some patients with lesions in the visual cortex exhibit above-chance visual performance in processing stimuli within their blind field, even when reporting no conscious awareness of the stimulus—a phenomenon known as Blindsight. In this study, we investigated four patients with lesions affecting visual cortical areas of varying etiologies and extents. Patients performed a spatial attention task where they had to indicate the presence and orientation of a grating with different spatial frequencies presented either on the intact or on the blind visual field. Simultaneously, intracranial EEG and peripheral physiological signals were recorded. Two patients exhibited classic blindsight symptoms, demonstrating above-chance performance in judging the orientation of a visual target when presented to the blind hemifield, especially for lower spatial frequencies. Notably, these patients had lesions in the right hemisphere, including primary visual cortex, whereas the other two patients, who showed no signs of blindsight, had lesions in the left hemisphere. This finding suggests a potential role for right hemisphere lesions, but not left hemisphere lesions, in the manifestation of blindsight symptoms. Follow-up analysis focuses on determining whether detection of visual stimuli can be decoded from physiological and brain signals originating from intact brain regions.
Keywords: Consciousness, blindsight, visual processing