Key Points
He discovered that older children may acquire visual tasks such as recognising faces, differentiating objects from a background, and perceiving motion in several studies of children in India who underwent surgery to remove congenital cataracts after the age of 7...
Given the remarkable level of remodeling of brain structure that we are seeing, it reinforces the point that we have been trying to make with our behavioral results, that all children ought to be provided treatment, says Pawan Sinha, an MIT professor of brain and cognitive sciences and one of the authors of the study...
The researchers also tested the participants performance on a variety of visual tasks and found that their ability to distinguish faces from other objects was correlated with the amount of structural change in the white matter pathways associated with higher-order visual function...
In comparison, while the treated children showed some improvements in visual acuity the ability to clearly see details of objects at a distance their acuity never fully recovered, and they showed only minimal changes in the white matter organization of the early visual pathways...
The findings suggest that older children can benefit from this kind of surgery and offers further evidence that it should be offered to them, Sinha says.. If the brain has such outstanding abilities to reconfigure itself and even to change its structure, then we really ought to capitalize on that plasticity and provide children with treatment, irrespective of age, he said..
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