Neuroplastic Mechanisms Underlying Perceptual and Cognitive Enhancement

Copyright © 2016 Etienne de Villers-Sidani et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The remarkable plastic nature of our brain, often manifesting itself via changes in how brain circuits code information, is at the origin of the many complex skills we master both during early development and adulthood. Intensive work in the last few decades in both human and animal models has revealed the multiple facets of brain plasticity and culminated recently in the explosion of the field of cognitive neurotherapeutics, bringing hope that brain plasticity can be used for the remediation of a wide range of cognitive, perceptual, or motor deficits. This growing interest in brain plasticity now shared by the general public has however shed light on the fact that our understanding of the regulating mechanisms of plasticity in the young, adult, and aging brain and how it can be best harnessed for therapeutic purposes remains poor. This limitation stands as a significant roadblock in the elaboration of effective science-based strategies for the remediation of neurological impairments at all ages and the preservation of optimal brain function in older adults. The objective of this special issue is to bring further attention to the field of neuroplasticity and cognitive neu-rotherapeutics by presenting novel original work performed in humans and animal models focusing on the impact of experience on brain circuits and behavior. Studying plasticity in sensory and motor systems is a particularly powerful means of understanding how brain circuits are shaped by experience. This is reflected in this issue which features several articles related to adaptive and maladaptive sensory or motor learning in various clinical populations. For example, M. M. Shiell et al. demonstrate that structural plasticity in a typical auditory cortical region, the right planum temporale, supports enhanced visual performance (motion detection) in deaf individuals, the first evidence of a neuroanatomical marker of crossmodal plasticity in this population. In the same vein, M. S. Houde et al. present an overview on the effects of deafness on body-related (nonvisual) processes, by reinterpreting the current literature on the altered processing as result of deafness from the " body " point of view. In their article, I. Riquelme et al. studied somatosensory processing in children with autism spectrum disorder. They evidenced using standardized tests that these …