Similar categorical representation from sound and sight in the occipito-temporal cortex of sighted and blind

The Ventral Occipito-Temporal Cortex (VOTC) shows reliable category selective response to visual information. Do the development, topography and information content of this categorical organization depend on visual input or even visual experience? To further address this question, we used fMRI to characterize the brain responses to eight categories (4 living, 4 non-living) presented acoustically in sighted and early blind individuals, and visually in a separate sighted group. Using a combination of decoding and representational similarity analyses, we observed that VOTC reliably encodes sounds categories in the sighted and blind groups, using a representational structure strikingly similar to the one found in vision. Moreover, we found that the representational connectivity between VOTC and large-scale brain networks was substantially similar across modalities and groups. Blind people however showed higher decoding accuracies and higher inter-subject consistency for the representation of sounds in VOTC, and the correlation between the representational structure of visual and auditory categories was almost double in the blind when compared to the sighted group. Crucially, we also demonstrate that VOTC represents the categorical membership of sounds rather that their acoustic features in both groups. Our results suggest that early visual deprivation triggers an extension of the intrinsic categorical organization of VOTC that is at least partially independent from vision.

• Publication year

  2019

• Venue

  bioRxiv

• Publication date

  2019-07-30

• Fields of study

  Biology, Psychology

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1101/719690
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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