![]() In the auditory mode, there was a similar finding. She and her group discovered that adults with dyslexia have weaker pathway connections between a visual subcortical structure (the left visual thalamus) with an area of the cortex called V5/MT, which is critical for the perception of visual motion. ![]() To do this they have been focusing on the sensory pathways linked to these deep structures. Her team is exploring whether sensory processing difficulties in high-functioning autism contribute to social communication impairments, such as recognising vocal emotions and pitch in others, as well as in dyslexia, a learning disability characterised by difficulty in fluent reading. Katharina von Kriegstein, Technische Universität Dresden, Germany In autism, more so even than in dyslexia, basically almost all work is being done, or has been done, in the cerebral cortex (and structures having to do with emotion). von Kriegstein and her team are overcoming those challenges in humans by using newly developed techniques in ultra-high-resolution neuroimaging. So far, research into subcortical structures and dyslexia has largely focused on animal models and post-mortem cases. These structures have also been difficult to study using the non-invasive techniques available to date since they are small in size and positioned deeply within the brain. ‘But now we know there are a lot of feedback connections and so on and so it makes sense to look at these structures that have been thought to be very uninteresting for a long time.’ ‘The thinking was that actually that our eyes and ears deliver the sensory signals to the cerebral cortex and the subcortical structures are just for basically relaying this information and the cortex does all the very interesting stuff,’ she said. von Kriegstein believes that delving into less-studied neural processing machinery could explain some crucial communication issues in dyslexia and autism that were previously attributed mainly to dysfunction of the cortical regions. ‘So, in autism, more so even than in dyslexia, basically almost all work is being done, or has been done, in the cerebral cortex (and structures having to do with emotion).’ ‘The core thing is that we look at very early structures, the sensory pathways, whilst most of the researchers have been looking at cognitive function (in the cerebral cortex),’ she said. Through a project called SENSOCOM, she is exploring how sensory perception affects communication, focusing on the brain’s deep subcortical structures.īy doing this, she and her team are exploring a part of the brain traditionally excluded by research trying to understand communication impairments found in autism spectrum disorder and dyslexia, conditions which affect around 53 million people in Europe. Today, von Kriegstein is a professor of cognitive and clinical neuroscience at Technische Universität Dresden, Germany, who researches multisensory experiences – seeing and hearing. ![]() But her research since has revealed something else: ‘When we have brief communication with a person, for two minutes for example, we also use visual areas to help auditory processing, to help recognise the person by voice.’ In part, it was because she visually recognised her subjects. ‘No other subject had this weird activity,’ she recalled. Unlike her participants, her scans alone showed activity in the brain’s visual areas. During her postdoctoral studies, neuroscientist Katharina von Kriegstein was running experiments to see how hearing and voice recognition activated the brain’s auditory areas when she got a surprising result.
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