It has been more than 50 years since the first description of ocular dominance plasticity--the profound modification of primary visual cortex (V1) following temporary monocular deprivation. This discovery immediately attracted the intense interest of neurobiologists focused on the general question of how experience and deprivation modify the brain as a potential substrate for learning and memor...

We often close our eyes when we explore objects with our fingers to reduce the dominance of the visual system over our other senses. Here we show that eye closure, even in complete darkness, results in improved somatosensory perception due to a switch from visual predominance towards a somatosensory processing mode. Using a tactile discrimination task and functional neuroimaging (fMRI) data wer...

A test of cerebral dominance for language was administered to 51 cerebral palsied adults. The test consisted of dichotically presented words and in normal speaking adults had previously demonstrated very marked right ear superiority, interpreted as left cerebral dominance. The group of cerebral palsied subjects did not show the predicted right ear superiority. This finding may represent a chanc...

In the short time since its introduction, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has rapidly evolved to become an indispensable tool for clinical diagnosis and biomedical research. Recently, this methodology has been successfully used for the acquisition of functional, physiological, and biochemical information in intact systems, particularly in the human body. The ability to map areas of altered neu...

The extent to which brain structure is influenced by sensory input during development is a critical but controversial question. A paradigmatic system for studying this is the mammalian visual cortex. Maps of orientation preference (OP) and ocular dominance (OD) in the primary visual cortex of ferrets, cats and monkeys can be individually changed by altered visual input. However, the spatial rel...

The question of a sex difference in intelligence has long divided the experts. IQ researchers sum standardized subtest scores to calculate intelligence in general, and find that males outscore females by about 3.8 points, whereas factor analysts derive the g factor scores from intertest-correlations and find no consistent sex differences in general intelligence. The latter finding is puzzling, ...

A number of studies have reported changes in the hemispheric dominance in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) patients on functional, biochemical, and morphological level. Since asymmetry of the brain is also found in many vertebrates, we analyzed whether prenatal zinc deficient (PZD) mice, a mouse model with ASD like behavior, show alterations regarding brain lateralization on molecular and behavio...

We investigated cerebellar electrocortical activity before and after unilateral brain injury in anesthetized rats. Spectral analysis of cerebellar activity was obtained by Fast Fourier Transformation. There was a dominance of delta frequency range, while the wide gamma range presented no more than 5% of the total mean power spectra of cerebellar activity before brain injury. A few minutes after...

We previously found a dominant eye perceptional advantage in feature search (Vision Research, 2006). We now ask if this advantage extends to difficult conjunction search, which requires focused attention and depends on different cortical hierarchy levels. We determined eye dominance by the Hole-in-the-Card test. Using red-green glasses, subjects viewed a briefly presented, backward-masked, arra...