ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2016
Absence of visual experience modifies the neural basis of numerical thinking.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 42 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
42 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Properties of cross-modal occipital responses in early blindness: An ALE meta-analysis.NeuroImage. Clinical · 2019Pooled it
- Excitatory and inhibitory networks diverge following early blindness.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2026Article
- Initial organization and progressive expansion of the math-responsive brain network during the first school years.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Cortical functional connectivity in mouse models of early blindness: enucleation vs. anophthalmia.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2026Article
- Visual experience shapes functional connectivity between occipital and non-visual networks.eLife · 2026Article
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- Functional reorganization of the visual cortex in blindness: a connectivity perspective.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2026Review
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- Learning to Program "Recycles" Preexisting Frontoparietal Population Codes of Logical Algorithms.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2025Article
- Gestural and Verbal Evidence of Conceptual Representation Differences in Blind and Sighted Individuals.Cognitive science · 2025Article
- Spontaneous recruitment of the person-knowledge network by familiar voices in the congenitally blind.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Similar Computational Hierarchies for Reading and Speech in the Occipital Cortex of Sighed and Blind: Converging Evidence from fMRI and Chronometric TMS.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2025Article
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- The visual cortex in the blind but not the auditory cortex in the deaf becomes multiple-demand regions.Brain : a journal of neurology · 2024Article
- Spatiotemporal Dynamics of Successive Activations across the Human Brain during Simple Arithmetic Processing.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2024Article
- Neural specialization for 'visual' concepts emerges in the absence of vision.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- Against cortical reorganisation.eLife · 2023Article
- Similar object shape representation encoded in the inferolateral occipitotemporal cortex of sighted and early blind people.PLoS biology · 2023Article
- Entropy, complexity, and maturity in children's neural responses to naturalistic video lessons.Cortex; a journal devoted to the study of the nervous system and behavior · 2023Article
- Sensory modality and spoken language shape reading network in blind readers of Braille.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2023Article
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4 authors.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
In humans, the ability to reason about mathematical quantities depends on a frontoparietal network that includes the intraparietal sulcus (IPS). How do nature and nurture give rise to the neurobiology of numerical cognition? We asked how visual experience shapes the neural basis of numerical thinking by studying numerical cognition in congenitally blind individuals. Blind (n = 17) and blindfolded sighted (n = 19) participants solved math equations that varied in difficulty (e.g., 27 - 12 = x vs. 7 - 2 = x), and performed a control sentence comprehension task while undergoing fMRI. Whole-cortex analyses revealed that in both blind and sighted participants, the IPS and dorsolateral prefrontal cortices were more active during the math task than the language task, and activity in the IPS increased parametrically with equation difficulty. Thus, the classic frontoparietal number network is preserved in the total absence of visual experience. However, surprisingly, blind but not sighted individuals additionally recruited a subset of early visual areas during symbolic math calculation. The functional profile of these "visual" regions was identical to that of the IPS in blind but not sighted individuals. Furthermore, in blindness, number-responsive visual cortices exhibited increased functional connectivity with prefrontal and IPS regions that process numbers. We conclude that the frontoparietal number network develops independently of visual experience. In blindness, this number network colonizes parts of deafferented visual cortex. These results suggest that human cortex is highly functionally flexible early in life, and point to frontoparietal input as a mechanism of cross-modal plasticity in blindness.
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