Connective field modeling

The fine-scale functional correlation of striate cortex in sighted and blind people

To what extent are spontaneous neural signals within striate cortex organized by vision? We examined the fine-scale pattern of striate cortex correlations within and between hemispheres in rest-state BOLD fMRI data from sighted and blind people. In the sighted, we find that corticocortico correlation is well modeled as a Gaussian point-spread function across millimeters of striate cortical surface, rather than degrees of visual angle. Blindness produces a subtle change in the pattern of fine-scale striate correlations between hemispheres. Across participants blind before the age of 18, the degree of pattern alteration covaries with the strength of long-range correlation between left striate cortex and Broca's area. This suggests that early blindness exchanges local, vision-driven pattern synchrony of the striate cortices for long-range functional correlations potentially related to cross-modal representation.

Topographic dynamics in the resting brain

In this issue of Neuron, Wang et al. (2013) demonstrate that spontaneous neural activity measured using functional neuroimaging is strongly related to millisecond-scale neuronal interactions and topographically precise anatomical connections in the primate somatosensory cortex.