Vision drives the neural construction of a two-stage hierarchy of spatial processing in infancy

Monica Gori; Helene Vitali; Andrew J Bremner; Alessia Tonelli; Maria Bianca Amadeo; Walter Setti; Carolina Tammurello; Sabrina Signorini; Elena Cocchi; Giuseppina Giammari; Sandra Strazzer; Francesca Tinelli; Massimiliano Serafino; Paola Camicione; Claudio Campus

doi:10.1016/j.isci.2025.113707

Vision drives the neural construction of a two-stage hierarchy of spatial processing in infancy

iScience. 2025 Oct 4;28(11):113707. doi: 10.1016/j.isci.2025.113707. eCollection 2025 Nov 21.

Authors

Monica Gori¹, Helene Vitali^{1

2}, Andrew J Bremner³, Alessia Tonelli^{1

4}, Maria Bianca Amadeo¹, Walter Setti¹, Carolina Tammurello^{1

2}, Sabrina Signorini⁵, Elena Cocchi⁶, Giuseppina Giammari⁷, Sandra Strazzer⁷, Francesca Tinelli⁸, Massimiliano Serafino⁹, Paola Camicione⁹, Claudio Campus¹

Affiliations

¹ Unit for Visually Impaired People (U-VIP), Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, 16152 Genoa, Italy.
² DIBRIS, University of Genova, Genoa, Italy.
³ Centre for Developmental Science, School of Psychology, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK.
⁴ Department of Psychology, The University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia.
⁵ Developmental Neurophthalmology Unit, IRCCS Fondazione Mondino, Pavia, Italy.
⁶ Fondazione David Chiossone, Genoa, Italy.
⁷ Scientific Institute, IRCCS E. Medea, Bosisio Parini, Lecco, Italy.
⁸ Department of Developmental Neuroscience, IRCCS Fondazione Stella Maris, Pisa, Italy.
⁹ IRCSS Istituto Giannina Gaslini, Genoa, Italy.

Abstract

Here, we demonstrate the critical role of developmental vision in the origins of a neural processing hierarchy in which somatosensory events are mapped from somatotopic locations onto a body representation with respect to external space. Both sighted and severely visually impaired infants showed prominent contralateral somatosensory activation in uncrossed- and crossed-hands postures in the early feedforward stages of processing (45-65 ms). By 105-120 ms following the somatosensory stimulus, anatomically ipsilateral activation was observed in the crossed-hands posture in sighted infants only, which was directly related to behavioral orienting toward the incorrect hand, reflecting a remapping of touches with reference to the position of the limbs in external space. Severely visually impaired infants exhibited a somatosensory response that was persistent contralateral across early and later processing stages, with the early responses associated with behavior. These findings demonstrate how visual experience in early postnatal development constructs the neural-behavioral basis of embodied spatial perception.

Keywords: Developmental neuroscience; Neuroscience; Sensory neuroscience.