Impact of blindness onset on the representation of sound categories in occipital and temporal cortices

Abstract

How does blindness onset impact on the organization of cortical regions coding for the deprived and the remaining senses? We show that the coding of sound categories in the occipital cortex is enhanced and more stable within and across blind individuals when compared to sighted controls, while a reverse group difference is found in the temporal cortex. Importantly, occipital and temporal regions share a more similar representational structure in blind people, suggesting an interplay between the reorganization of occipital and temporal regions following visual deprivation. We suggest that early, and to some extent late blindness, induces network-level reorganization of the neurobiology of auditory categories by concomitantly increasing/decreasing the respective computational load of occipital/temporal regions. These results highlight the interactive nature of regional brain development in case of sensory deprivation.