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Psychological Science 2022

Development of Visual Memory Capacity Following Early-Onset and Extended Blindness

Priti Gupta1; Pragya Shah2; Sharon Gilad Gutnick3,4; Marin Vogelsang3,5,4; Lukas Vogelsang3,5,4; Kashish Tiwari6; Tapan Kumar Gandhi7; Suma Ganesh8; Pawan Sinha3,4

1 Indian Institute of Technology Indore · 2 Institute of Human Behaviour and Allied Sciences · 3 Institute of Cognitive and Brain Sciences · 4 Massachusetts Institute of Technology · 5 École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne · 6 All India Institute of Medical Sciences · 7 Department of Electrical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology · 8 Dr. Shroff’s Charity Eye Hospital

open access

Abstract

It is unknown whether visual memory capacity can develop if onset of pattern vision is delayed for several years following birth. We had an opportunity to address this question through our work with an unusual population of 12 congenitally blind individuals ranging in age from 8 to 22 years. After providing them with sight surgery, we longitudinally evaluated their visual memory capacity using an image-memorization task. Our findings revealed poor visual memory capacity soon after surgery but significant improvement in subsequent months. Although there may be limits to this improvement, performance 1 year after surgery was found to be comparable with that of control participants with matched visual acuity. These findings provide evidence for plasticity of visual memory mechanisms into late childhood but do not rule out vulnerability to early deprivation. Our computational simulations suggest that a potential mechanism to account for changes in memory performance may be progressive representational elaboration in image encoding.

DOI
10.1177/09567976211056664
Sources
openalex

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