Neuroscience Seminar Series for Rising Scholars (Hybrid): Sunyoung Park, PhD (Noelle Stiles lab)
“Functional changes in visual areas during imagination in the blind following vision restoration”
Speaker: Sunyoung Park, PhD, Postdoctoral Scholar, PI: Noelle Stiles
Date and Time: Monday, May 18, 2026, 12:00 PM
In-Person: Room 127, Staged Research Building (SRB), Busch Campus
Join via Zoom: Please email the host, Dr. Noelle Stiles (noelle.stiles@rutgers.edu), or check the CAHBIR Slack #General thread for the link
Abstract: The Argus II retinal prosthesis can restore ultra-low vision in the late blind through electrical stimulation of ganglion cells. Our previous study showed that cortical thickness increases following the Argus II device implantation in visual areas, such as cuneus cortex and lateral occipital cortex, suggesting partial reversal of visual cortex atrophy associated with long-term vision loss. However, it remains unclear whether these structural changes are accompanied by increased functional engagement of visual areas during visual tasks. Here, we investigated changes in visual cortex activation during a visual imagery task using fMRI in ten Argus II patients, four blind controls, and three sighted controls. The visual imagery task was used as it has been shown to functionally engage visual areas and the Argus II device cannot be activated inside the scanner. During the task, participants alternated between imagination blocks in which they imagined visual objects or places, and rest blocks in which they did not perform a task. We extracted task-related univariate activations (imagination > rest) from anatomically defined visual regions of interests (ROIs). On average, the Argus II group showed greater activation than the blind control group, approaching but not fully reaching the activation levels observed in sighted controls. In addition, longitudinal comparisons in two participants revealed differing post-implantation patterns: The participant with longer device use (44.5 months) showed increased activation across most ROIs after implantation relative to pre-implantation, whereas the participant with shorter device use (6.5 months) showed a mixture of increases and decreases across ROIs. These findings suggest that cortical re-engagement following vision restoration may evolve over time, and that both upregulation and downregulation of task-relevant regions may contribute to functional reorganization after visual restoration. Together, these results complement prior evidence of structural cortical changes by demonstrating functional changes in visual areas following vision restoration in late-blind individuals.
