ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2017
Development of visual category selectivity in ventral visual cortex does not require visual experience.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 68 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
68 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 164 citations in OpenAlex.
- Social cognition in the blind brain: A coordinate-based meta-analysis.Human brain mapping · 2021Pooled it
- Visual Word Form Area demonstrates individual and task-agnostic consistency but inter-individual variability.Developmental cognitive neuroscience · 2026Article
- Rethinking category-selectivity in human visual cortex.Cognitive neuroscience · 2026Review
- Combined evidence from artificial neural networks and human brain-lesion models reveals that language modulates vision in human perception.Nature human behaviour · 2026Article
- Infants have rich visual categories in ventrotemporal cortex at 2 months of age.Nature neuroscience · 2026Article
- Early face deprivation leads to long-lasting deficits in cortical face processing.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Functional reorganization of the visual cortex in blindness: a connectivity perspective.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2026Review
- Impact of a transient neonatal visual deprivation on the development of the ventral occipito-temporal cortex in humans.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Action-type mapping principles extend beyond evolutionarily conserved actions, even in people born without hands.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Visual and Auditory Object Representations in Ventral Visual Cortex After Restoring Sight in Humans.Human brain mapping · 2025Article
- Decoding semantic sound categories in early visual cortex.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2025Article
- White matter connections of human ventral temporal cortex are organized by cytoarchitecture, eccentricity and category-selectivity from birth.Nature human behaviour · 2025Article
- Article
- White matter connections of human ventral temporal cortex are organized by cytoarchitecture, eccentricity, and category-selectivity from birth.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Revealing the co-existence of written and spoken language coding neural populations in the visual word form area.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2025Article
- Longitudinal stability of individual brain plasticity patterns in blindness.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- A Whole-Brain Topographic Ontology.Annual review of neuroscience · 2024Review
- Article
- Distinct Yet Proximal Face- and Body-Selective Brain Regions Enable Clutter-Tolerant Representations of the Face, Body, and Whole Person.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2024Article
- Neural correlates of individual facial recognition in a social wasp.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
8 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
Abstract
To what extent does functional brain organization rely on sensory input? Here, we show that for the penultimate visual-processing region, ventral-temporal cortex (VTC), visual experience is not the origin of its fundamental organizational property, category selectivity. In the fMRI study reported here, we presented 14 congenitally blind participants with face-, body-, scene-, and object-related natural sounds and presented 20 healthy controls with both auditory and visual stimuli from these categories. Using macroanatomical alignment, response mapping, and surface-based multivoxel pattern analysis, we demonstrated that VTC in blind individuals shows robust discriminatory responses elicited by the four categories and that these patterns of activity in blind subjects could successfully predict the visual categories in sighted controls. These findings were confirmed in a subset of blind participants born without eyes and thus deprived from all light perception since conception. The sounds also could be decoded in primary visual and primary auditory cortex, but these regions did not sustain generalization across modalities. Surprisingly, although not as strong as visual responses, selectivity for auditory stimulation in visual cortex was stronger in blind individuals than in controls. The opposite was observed in primary auditory cortex. Overall, we demonstrated a striking similarity in the cortical response layout of VTC in blind individuals and sighted controls, demonstrating that the overall category-selective map in extrastriate cortex develops independently from visual experience.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.