Hierarchical cortical plasticity in congenital sight impairment

In congenital achromatopsia, V3 shows plasticity in readout of V1 inputs, with near-fovea sampling and aggregation across smaller V1 cortical areas.

• Why it matters: The brain must remain stable while adapting to altered sensory input, but how this balance emerges across visual processing stages is unclear. This matters for interpreting restored vision after long-term deprivation.
• What they did: Using structural imaging plus population receptive field and connective field modelling, the study compared achromatopsia (rod-only photoreceptor inputs) with typically developed rod systems to separate life-long from transient effects.
• The result: V1 remained highly stable with no substantial retinotopic remapping despite structural deprivation, while V3 reorganized sampling and integration of V1 signals. This implies sight-rescue therapies must account for downstream adaptations to absent input.

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