Category-specific organization in the human brain does not require visual experience

By Bradford Z. Mahon, Stefano Anzellotti, Jens Schwarzbach, M. Zampini, Alfonso Caramazza. 2009

803 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Summary The ventral stream refers to a neural pathway that projects from early visual areas through to anterior temporal cortex, and comprises regions in ventral and lateral occipital-temporal cortex. The ventral stream is critical for recognizing visually presented objects. Functional imaging studies of the human brain have shown that different regions within the ventral stream show differential activation to nonliving (tools, houses) and living stimuli (animals, faces). The causes of these category preferences are widely debated. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we find that the same regions of the ventral stream that show category preferences for nonliving stimuli and animals in sighted adults, show the same category preferences in adults who are blind since birth. Both blind and sighted participants had larger blood oxygen-level dependent (BOLD) responses in the medial fusiform gyrus for nonliving stimuli compared to animal stimuli, and differential BOLD responses in lateral occipital cortex for animal stimuli compared to nonliving stimuli. These findings demonstrate that the medial-to-lateral bias by conceptual domain in the ventral stream does not require visual experience in order to develop, and suggest the operation of innately determined domain-specific constraints on the organization of object knowledge.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience

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Citations in the corpus

Meta-Consolidation for Continual Learning (2020, neutral): “Studies of the human brain suggest that knowledge and skills to solve tasks are represented in a meta-space of concepts with a high-level semantic basis [28, 10, 50].”
The origins of metamodality in visual object area LO: Bodily topographical biases and increased functional connectivity to S1 (2016, positive): “Several studies have reported a-modal multisensory activation in the traditional visual cortical areas of sighted individuals (Amedi et al., 2001; Beauchamp et al., 2007; Costantini et al., 2011; James et al., 2002; Mahon et al., 2009; see Beauchamp, 2005 for review).”
Concepts and Compositionality: In Search of the Brain's Language of Thought. (2020, neutral): “…anatomical dissociations based on sensory-motor features (Thompson-Schill 2003,Patterson et al. 2007),more abstract features such as object size (Konkle&Caramazza 2013), and evenmore abstract conceptual domains, such as animate versus inanimate entities (Mahon et al. 2009, Connolly et al. 2012).”
How Visual Is the Visual Cortex? Comparing Connectional and Functional Fingerprints between Congenitally Blind and Sighted Individuals (2015, neutral): “The mask was defined according to three criteria (Mahon et al., 2009): (1) the voxels were activated (random effects, FDR corrected, p 0.”
Generating sparse and selective third-order responses in the olfactory system of the fly (2010, background): “Stereotyped connections to the amygdala may mediate innate olfactory responses and random inputs to the piriform cortex (38) may mediate more measured or learned olfactory behavior.”
The Sparseness of Mixed Selectivity Neurons Controls the Generalization-Discrimination Trade-Off (2013, background): “First, there is accumulating experimental evidence that for some neural systems random connectivity is an important representational and computational substrate (Stettler and Axel, 2009).”
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ind the blind brain to understand the sighted one ! Is there a upramodal cortical functional architecture ? (2014, positive): “, tool represenation in left parietal cortex (Mahon et al., 2009), voice recognition n the superior temporal cortex (Gougoux et al.”
Sparseness and expansion in sensory representations. (2014, background): “, 2012), only about 10% of the neurons in the piriform cortex show an evoked response to each odorant (Stettler and Axel, 2009; Poo and Isaacson, 2009).”