Orthographic Priming in Braille Reading as Evidence for Task-specific Reorganization in the Ventral Visual Cortex of the Congenitally Blind

Autor: Ewa Sumera, Aleksandra Urbańczyk, Marcin Szwed, Maksymilian Korczyk, Katarzyna Rączy, Jakub Szewczyk
Rok vydání: 2019
Předmět:
Zdroj: Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience. 31:1065-1078
ISSN: 1530-8898
0898-929X
DOI: 10.1162/jocn_a_01407
Popis: The task-specific principle asserts that, following deafness or blindness, the deprived cortex is reorganized in a manner such that the task of a given area is preserved even though its input modality has been switched. Accordingly, tactile reading engages the ventral occipitotemporal cortex (vOT) in the blind in a similar way to regular reading in the sighted. Others, however, show that the vOT of the blind processes spoken sentence structure, which suggests that the task-specific principle might not apply to vOT. The strongest evidence for the vOT's engagement in sighted reading comes from orthographic repetition–suppression studies. Here, congenitally blind adults were tested in an fMRI repetition–suppression paradigm. Results reveal a double dissociation, with tactile orthographic priming in the vOT and auditory priming in general language areas. Reconciling our finding with other evidence, we propose that the vOT in the blind serves multiple functions, one of which, orthographic processing, overlaps with its function in the sighted.
Databáze: OpenAIRE
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