IEEE Access (Jan 2020)
Perspective-Taking in Blindness: An Event- Related Brain Potentials Study With the Continuous Wavelet Transform
Abstract
This study presents brain electrophysiological characteristics of perspective-taking for blind individuals ver. sighted ones, aiming to extend our knowledge on social concept formation with visual sensory modality loss. A blind and a sighted group instructed to consider the moral dilemmas therein from a neutral (observer), a morally positive or a negative stance, after the auditory presentation of Aesop's fables. We recorded the basic emotions evoked by every stance in each fable, and the late positive potentials (LPP) component of Event-Related Potential detected with Continuous Wavelet Transform, believed to reflect the sustained attention and stimuli encoding processes. Blind participants demonstrated: i) significantly attenuated LPP amplitudes at distributed brain areas, particularly at leads T3, P4, O2, T6, Cz, Pz, CPz and CP4 (p values 0.026-0.003), ii) prolonged LPP latencies at parietal areas, at leads CP4 (p=0.009), Pz (p=0.019), and P4 (p=0.023), iii) shorter latencies at the frontal area (lead FPz, p=0.026) and iv) significantly shorter latencies at the right posterior centrotemporal area under the negative than the positive condition (lead C4, p=0.009). Both groups exhibited higher LPP amplitudes under the morally positive, and lower under the negative condition located at the parietal areas (P3, p=0.001 and CPz, p=0.013). The relationships between behavior and LPP activation conform to the proposed generation and modulation of LPP. Our findings suggest that the visually deprived cortex may become more responsive to processes associated with perspective-taking, possibly through compensatory plasticity enabling cross-modal reorganization. Thus, the study introduces a novel model for accessing the sustained attention and stimulus-encoding processes underlying perspective-taking.
Keywords
