The visual cortices of congenitally and non-congenitally blind individuals become a part of cognitive control network

Abstract

Neural plasticity is crucial for understanding the extent to which a biological structure determines its function. As such, the fate of visual and auditory cortices when deprived of their standard inputs has immense significance in neuroscientific research. Empirical findings suggest that the visual cortex of the congenital and early blind activates across a very wide range of tasks in auditory, tactile and olfactory modalities. We hypothesized that these regions may transform into task positive multiple demand (MD) regions. A key feature of these regions is that they activate to all kinds of tasks in all kinds of modalities. In this study, we investigate whether deprived cortices in blind exhibit key characteristic inherent to fronto-parietal MD regions. We had congenitally and non-congenitally blind participants done four fMRI cognitive control tasks in tactile and auditory modalities. The visual cortices of the blind group showed (1) intense activity during more demanding conditions of the four diverse tasks along with the fronto-parietal control regions, (2) the same set of occipital voxels in blind participants activated across diverse modalities under increased cognitive demands of the four diverse tasks. Our findings suggest that deprived visual cortices of the blind, in fact, become a part of cognitive control network.