The impact of early blindness on the development of hippocampal cognitive maps

Cognitive maps in the hippocampal formation are spatial representations that allow mammals to navigate the environment and store spatial relationships in memory. Over the last decade, however, evidence has shown that spatially tuned neurons in the medial temporal lobe—such as place cells, grid cells, and head-direction cells, which constitute the building blocks of cognitive maps—also encode nonspatial dimensions of experience with geometric precision. That is, the neurocognitive machinery that mammals evolved to navigate physical space may have been recycled to organize and retrieve declarative knowledge tout court.

In this talk, I will present several studies investigating how early visual deprivation impacts the development of hippocampal cognitive maps, by testing early blind participants in both spatial and conceptual navigation tasks. The findings indicate that lack of vision leads to alterations in the structure and stability of the neural geometries underlying spatial and conceptual cognitive maps. I will present fMRI data supporting this claim, together with a computational model that explains how some of these alterations may arise as a consequence of blindness.

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