Deafness and sign language experience shift visual category representations

Abstract

Childhood visual experiences shape our ability to rapidly recognize faces and objects. Across development, regions processing visual categories that lose relevance, such as hands, are recycled for others. How would visual cortex accommodate a childhood in which hands maintain significance? Through functional magnetic resonance imaging, we demonstrate that high-level visual cortex in Deaf signers develops a unique topography to accommodate the learning of sign language in childhood, with distinct but significant changes observed in hearing signers who acquired sign language in adulthood. These data suggest a new framework for human visual cortex in which the location of regions is not as fixed as once thought, and sociolinguistic experience outside the childhood plasticity period may be sufficient to alter the function of high-level visual cortex.