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45
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Introduction
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November 2009 - December 2013
Publications
Publications (45)
Hand(s)-tapping tasks have been extensively studied in order to characterize the features of sensorimotor synchronization (SMS). These tasks frequently require participants to synchronize their tapping pace to an external, metronome-like sound. The impact of ageing on SMS abilities remains mainly unexplored. Thus, we conducted a series of hand tapp...
This report summarizes the existing literature on the use of technology for the assessment of freezing of gait (FOG) as well as the use of technology to provide insights into the mechanisms of FOG in people with Parkinson's disease. Specifically, this work was carried out for the 3rd International Workshop on Freezing of Gait in Jerusalem in 2025....
Parkinson’s Disease (PD)-typical declines in gait coordination are possibly explained by weakness in bilateral cortical and muscular connectivity. Here, we seek to determine whether this weakness and consequent decline in gait coordination is affected by dopamine levels. To this end, we compare cortico-cortical, cortico-muscular, and intermuscular...
Movement deterioration is the hallmark of Parkinson’s disease (PD), characterized by levodopa-induced motor-fluctuations (i.e., symptoms’ variability related to the medication cycle) in advanced stages. However, motor symptoms are typically too sporadically and/or subjectively assessed, ultimately preventing the effective monitoring of their progre...
[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0250281.].
Introduction:
Freezing of gait (FoG) is a debilitating symptom of advanced Parkinson's disease (PD) characterized by a sudden, episodic stepping arrest despite the intention to continue walking. The etiology of FoG is still unknown, but accumulating evidence unraveled physiological signatures of the autonomic nervous system (ANS) around FoG episod...
Background:
Vertical perturbations are one major cause of falling. Incidentally, while conducting a comprehensive study comparing effects of vertical versus horizontal perturbations, we commonly observed a stumbling-like response induced by upward perturbations. The present study describes and characterizes this stumbling effect.
Methods:
Fourte...
Freezing of Gait (FOG) is among the most debilitating symptoms of Parkinson’s Disease (PD), characterized by a sudden inability to generate effective stepping. In preparation for the development of a real-time FOG prediction and intervention device, this work presents a novel FOG prediction algorithm based on detection of altered interlimb coordina...
Humans, like most animals, integrate sensory input in the brain from different sensory modalities. Yet humans are distinct in their ability to grasp symbolic input, which is interpreted into a cognitive mental representation of the world. This representation merges with external sensory input, providing modality integration of a different sort. Thi...
As neuroscience and rehabilitative techniques advance, age-old questions concerning the visual experience of those who gain sight after blindness, once thought to be philosophical alone, take center stage and become the target for scientific inquiries. In this study, we employ a battery of visual perception tasks to study the unique experience of a...
Previous evidence suggests that visual experience is crucial for the emergence and tuning of the typical neural system for face recognition. To challenge this conclusion, we trained congenitally blind adults to recognize faces via visual-to-auditory sensory-substitution (SDD). Our results showed a preference for trained faces over other SSD-conveye...
The phenomenology of the blind has provided an age-old, unparalleled means of exploring the enigmatic link between the brain and mind. This paper delves into the unique phenomenological experience of a man who became blind in adulthood. He subsequently underwent both an Argus II retinal prosthesis implant and training, and extensive training on the...
Unlike sighted individuals, congenitally blind individuals have little to no experience with face shapes. Instead, they rely on non-shape cues, such as voices, to perform character identification. The extent to which face-shape perception can be learned in adulthood via a different sensory modality (i.e., not vision) remains poorly explored. We use...
Can humans extend and augment their natural perceptions during adulthood? Here, we address this fascinating question by investigating the extent to which it is possible to successfully augment visual spatial perception to include the backward spatial field (a region where humans are naturally blind) via other sensory modalities (i.e., audition). We...
Perceiving the spatial location and physical dimensions of touched objects is crucial for goal-directed actions. To achieve this, our brain transforms skin-based coordinates into a reference frame by integrating visual and posture information. In the current study, we examine the role of posture in mapping tactile sensations to a visual image. We d...
Sensory Substitution Devices (SSDs) convey visual information through audition or touch, targeting blind and visually impaired individuals. One bottleneck towards adopting SSDs in everyday life by blind users, is the constant dependency on sighted instructors throughout the learning process. Here, we present a proof-of-concept for the efficacy of a...
Geometrical intuitions spontaneously drive visuo-spatial reasoning in human adults, children and animals. Is their emergence intrinsically linked to visual experience, or does it reflect a core property of cognition shared across sensory modalities? To address this question, we tested the sensitivity of blind-from-birth adults to geometrical-invari...
Topographic maps, a key principle of brain organization, emerge during development. It remains unclear, however, whether topographic maps can represent a new sensory experience learned in adulthood. MaMe, a congenitally blind individual, has been extensively trained in adulthood for perception of a 2D auditory-space (soundscape) where the y- and x-...
Reading is a unique human cognitive skill and its acquisition was proven to extensively affect both brain organization and neuroanatomy. Differently from western sighted individuals, literacy rates via tactile reading systems, such as Braille, are declining, thus imposing an alarming threat to literacy among non-visual readers. This decline is due...
Perceiving the spatial location and physical dimensions of objects that we touch is crucial for goal-directed actions. To achieve this, our brain transforms skin-based coordinates into a reference frame by integrating visual and proprioceptive cues, a process known as tactile remapping. In the current study, we examine the role of proprioception in...
We review here studies with visual and auditory deprived/recovery populations to argue for the need of a redefinition of the crucial role of unisensory-specific experiences during critical periods (CPs) on the emergence of sensory specializations. Specifically, we highlight that these studies, with emphasis on results with congenitally blind adults...
Background:
Hearing loss is becoming a real social and health problem. Its prevalence in the elderly is an epidemic. The risk of developing hearing loss is also growing among younger people. If left untreated, hearing loss can perpetuate development of neurodegenerative diseases, including dementia. Despite recent advancements in hearing aid (HA)...
Visual-to-auditory Sensory Substitution Devices (SSDs) are a family of non-invasive devices for visual rehabilitation aiming at conveying whole-scene visual information through the intact auditory modality. Although proven effective in lab environments, the use of SSDs has yet to be systematically tested in real-life situations. To start filling th...
This volume presents the latest research on language, literacy and numeracy, cognition, and social and emotional development of deaf learners. It is written by internationally recognized researchers and practitioners. In their contributions they discuss the backgrounds and contexts of their research, take interdisciplinary perspectives in merging t...
The human brain is a formidably complex and adaptable organ capable of rewiring itself or adjusting existing connections in order to learn and to maximize its survival edge. Studies using sensory substitution devices have had a big impact on the uncovering of the mechanisms subtending brain organization. Sensory substitution devices are capable of...
Multisensory interactions in deaf cognition are largely unexplored. Unisensory studies suggest that behavioral/neural changes may bemore prominent for visual compared to tactile processing in early deaf adults. Here we test whether such an asymmetry results in increased saliency of vision over touch during visuo-tactile interactions. About 23 early...
How do the anatomically consistent functional selectivities of the brain emerge? A new study by Bola and colleagues reveals task selectivity in auditory rhythm-selective areas in congenitally deaf adults perceiving visual rhythm sequences. Here, we contextualize this result with accumulating evidence from animal and human studies supporting sensory...
The aim of the present study was to investigate the impact of dynamic distractors on the time-course of oculomotor selection using saccade trajectory deviations. Participants were instructed to make a speeded eye movement (pro-saccade) to a target presented above or below the fixation point while an irrelevant distractor was presented. Four types o...
Evidence of task-specific sensory-independent (TSSI) plasticity from blind and deaf populations has led to a better understanding of brain organization. However, the principles determining the origins of this plasticity remain unclear. We review recent data suggesting that a combination of the connectivity bias and sensitivity to task-distinctive f...
In 2 experiments we investigated attentional orienting to nonpredictive social and nonsocial cues in deaf observers. In Experiment 1a, 22 early deaf adults and 23 hearing controls performed a peripheral shape-discrimination task, while uninformative central gaze cues validly and invalidly cued the location of the target. As an adaptation to the lac...
Previous work investigating the consequence of bilateral deafness on attentional selection suggests that experience-dependent changes in this population may result in increased automatic processing of stimulus-driven visual information (e.g., saliency). However, adaptive behavior also requires observers to prioritize goal-driven information relevan...
One of the most striking demonstrations of experience-dependent plasticity comes from studies of sensory deprived individuals (e.g., blind or deaf), showing that brain regions deprived of their natural inputs change their sensory tuning to support the processing of inputs coming from the spared senses. These mechanisms of crossmodal plasticity have...
Action videogame players (AVGPs) have been shown to outperform nongamers (NVGPs) in covert visual attention tasks. These advantages have been attributed to improved top-down control in this population. The time course of visual selection, which permits researchers to highlight when top-down strategies start to control performance, has rarely been i...
Early deaf adults typically respond faster than hearing controls when performing a speeded simple detection on visual targets. Whether this response time advantage can generalise to another intact modality (touch) or it is instead specific to visual processing remained unexplored. We tested eight early deaf adults and twelve hearing controls in a s...
Plastic changes have been continuously reported in profound bilateral deaf adults in terms of a substantial reorganization of both perceptual and attentive processes compared to hearing controls. To what extent these changes depend on the solely auditory deprivation or they could be also a result of intensive visual training regimens without a sens...
The widespread intuition that sensory deprivation should enhance processing in the intact modalities has been primarily tested in unisensory contexts. This approach has the limit of not probing for potential changes in the interaction between intact modalities, ultimately not allowing to conclude whether documented unisensory advantages always domi...