Recalibrating vision-for-action requires years after sight restoration from congenital blindness
Description
We investigated whether early visual and visuomotor experience is essential for developing the ability to recalibrate the sensorimotor system. We tested young individuals who suffered from congenital visual deprivation due to bilateral cataracts before undergoing sight restoration surgery years later. We altered participants’ visuomotor mapping using prism goggles shifting their visual field laterally, and asked participants to perform a pointing task. We compared their recalibration performance to such distortion to that of two sighted controls: one matched to cataract-treated participants for age, the other matched also for visual acuity (i.e., tested with visual blur). The Excel files show, for each participant, the pointing error in each trial, expressed as a difference (in degrees of visual error) between target location and endpoint location (negative values = leftward error, positive = rightward error). For each participant, demographic data and a global measure of their ability to recalibrate to the visual distortion (recalibration index, irecal) are reported. S1_main reports the data which contribute to the main text: the performance of the cataract-treated participants in their first test after surgery (all sample), as well as the performance of the subset of participants who took part also in the follow up and/or in the pre-surgical evaluations, and the performance of the two control groups of sighted participants (i.e., tested with/without visual blur). S2_suppl_info reports the data relative to the development of the recalibration ability in the typical population, which are reported in the Supplementary Information.