Visuotactile interactions in the congenitally acallosal brain: evidence for early cerebral plasticity

Abstract

Studies in patients with an isolated, congenital agenesis of the corpus callosum have documented potentials and limits of brain plasticity. Literature suggests that early reorganization mechanisms can compensate for the absence of the corpus callosum in unisensory tasks that involve interhemispheric transfer. It is unknown, however, how the congenitally acallosal brain processes multisensory information, which presumably requires interhemispheric transfer of modality-specific input. Therefore, we tested five patients with total and one patient with partial agenesis of the corpus callosum in a visuotactile interference task (the "crossmodal congruency task") with uncrossed and crossed hands and compared their performance to that of 31 healthy controls. We found that congruency effects followed the hands in space not only in healthy, but also in congenitally acallosal individuals. Remarkably, this was also true when patients' hands crossed the vertical visual meridian and stimuli were presented at the same hand. These results suggest that callosal connectivity is not required for remapping of visuotactile space. We conclude that early brain plasticity allows for compensation of the developmental absence of the corpus callosum in a visuotactile interference task.