Social cognition skills are typically acquired on the basis of visual information (e.g., the observation of gaze, facial expressions, gestures). In light of this, a critical issue is whether and how the lack of visual experience affects neurocognitive mechanisms underlying social skills. This issue has been largely neglected in the literature on blindness, despite difficulties in social interactions may be particular salient in the life of blind individuals (especially children). Here we provide a meta‐analysis of neuroimaging studies reporting brain activations associated to the representation of self and others' in early blind individuals and in sighted controls. Our results indicate that early blindness does not critically impact on the development of the “social brain,” with social tasks performed on the basis of auditory or tactile information driving consistent activations in nodes of the action observation network, typically active during actual observation of others in sighted individuals. Interestingly though, activations along this network appeared more left‐lateralized in the blind than in sighted participants. These results may have important implications for the development of specific training programs to improve social skills in blind children and young adults.

中文翻译：

---

盲人大脑中的社会认知：基于坐标的元分析

社会认知技能通常是在视觉信息（例如，对凝视、面部表情、手势的观察）的基础上获得的。有鉴于此，一个关键问题是视觉体验的缺乏是否以及如何影响社交技能背后的神经认知机制。尽管在盲人（尤其是儿童）的生活中，社会交往的困难可能特别突出，但关于失明的文献在很大程度上忽略了这个问题。在这里，我们提供了神经影像学研究的荟萃分析，报告了与早期失明个体和视力正常对照中自我和他人表征相关的大脑活动。我们的研究结果表明，早期失明对“社交大脑、”在听觉或触觉信息的基础上执行的社会任务驱动动作观察网络节点的一致激活，通常在有视力个体的其他人的实际观察过程中活跃。有趣的是，与视力正常的参与者相比，盲人中沿该网络的激活似乎更偏左。这些结果可能对制定特定的培训计划以提高盲童和年轻人的社交技能具有重要意义。