Lasting Effects of Early Blindness a Case Study

A young woman, blinded by the development of corneal opacity at the age of 3 years, was given a corneal graft at the age of 27. Though the image-forming powers of the eye were largely restored, the patient showed little recovery of functional vision. Six months after operation she could detect and locate conspicuous objects and had some degree of ambient spatial vision but she could not learn to recognize simple visual patterns. Eventually she reverted to the life of a blind person. Her failure to recover is discussed in terms of the known deleterious effects of restricted early visual experience on the development of the visual cortex in animals.