Schedule of Events | Symposia

The visual cortex in the blind but not the auditory cortex in the deaf becomes multiple demands regions

Poster Session B - Sunday, March 30, 2025, 8:00 – 10:00 am EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Hasan Duymuş^1,2,3 (hasanduymus9@gmail.com), Mohini Verma^2,3, Ausaf Ahmed Farooqui^2,3; ¹Ankara Yıldırım Beyazıt University, ²Bilkent University, ³National Magnetic Resonance Reseach Center, Bilkent University

When sensory brain regions are deprived of their standard inputs, they activate differently compared to non-deprived sensory regions. In blind individuals, visual regions activate during a range of auditory, tactile, and olfactory tasks, while in deaf individuals, auditory regions activate during visual and tactile tasks. These findings suggest that deprived sensory regions in blind and deaf individuals may integrate into the multiple-demand (MD) network—a group of fronto-parietal regions activated by any task-relevant events and cognitive control demands across different task modalities. In this study, we investigated whether deprived sensory cortices showed the key characteristics of MD regions, that is, activation of the same foci in response to diverse control demands. We recruited 22 congenitally and early blind individuals, 10 early deaf individuals, and 20 sighted controls to perform up to four fMRI tasks involving different modalities. In the hard blocks of these tasks, participants: (1) made difficult tactile size judgments, (2) maintained and updated more working memory items, (3) performed more demanding time-duration judgments, and (4) executed more rapid motor responses. In the blind group, almost the entire occipital cortex, alongside MD regions, activated during the hard blocks of all tasks. Further, the same sets of individual occipital voxels in the blind activated to the four different control demands (BF10 > 28). However, auditory regions in the deaf group did not exhibit control-related activation (BF01 > 3). These findings showed that the visual cortex in the blind, but not the auditory cortex in the deaf, becomes MD regions.

Topic Area: EXECUTIVE PROCESSES: Working memory