Ella Striem-Amit
Georgetown University
Assistant Professor/Lecturer
Blindness, Brain plasticity, Visual deprivation, Development, Action, Hands, Congenital amputation, Neuroscience, Sensory rehabilitation
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I study the way developing deprived of a sensory modality (for example, being born blind, deaf) or body part (individuals born without hands) affects brain organization and cognition. This allows testing if sensory or motor experience in each sense is required for specific brain systems to develop, and how these plastically change in their absence.
The sensory-motor deprivation models serve to assess the roles of critical developmental periods, compensatory cross-modal plasticity and sensory-independent (a-modal) processes in the human brain.