Schedule of Events | Symposia

Impact of Early Visual Deprivation on Grid-Like Coding during Conceptual Navigation

Poster Session B - Sunday, March 30, 2025, 8:00 – 10:00 am EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Roberto Bottini Università di Trento¹ (bottini.r@gmail.com), Federica Sigismondi¹; ¹University of Trento

In humans, grid-like activity in the entorhinal cortex (EC) has been associated with the encoding of both spatial and abstract knowledge. Recently, it has been observed that the typical 6-fold symmetry associated with grid-like coding in EC was altered in early blind (EB) individuals during spatial navigation. Whether the same alteration can also be observed during conceptual navigation is still unclear. Twenty-three EB and twenty-four sighted controls (SC) were asked to navigate a sound space defined by pitch and duration. Participants performed a sound-analogy task in which they determined whether the changes in pitch and duration were identical across different sound pairs. Data were analysed using quadrature filter technique on the periodicity of interest (60˚ periodicity), to examine the presence of grid-like coding, and on control models with different rotational periodicities. Adaptation analysis was conducted to investigate the encoding of Euclidean distances between sounds across groups. We detected a significant 6-fold symmetry in the EC of SC during the navigation of the sound space but not in the EC of EB individuals, with a significant difference between the two groups. No other significant activations were detected by any of the control models tested, either in SC or EB. Interestingly, both SC and EB recruit the same fronto-parietal network to compute Euclidean distances in sound space, suggesting similar computations across groups, and limiting the differences to the entorhinal grid system. These results suggest that early visual deprivation influences the emergence of grid-like coding in humans’ EC during conceptual navigation.

Topic Area: LONG-TERM MEMORY: Other