Schedule of Events | Symposia

Crossmodal task and modality representations in the auditory cortex of deaf and hearing individuals

Poster Session A - Saturday, March 29, 2025, 3:00 – 5:00 pm EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Velia Cardin¹ (velia.cardin@ucl.ac.uk), Konstantin Grin¹, Martin Eimer², Samuel Evans³, Luigi Tamè⁴, Bencie Woll¹, Rita Bertani¹, Dilay Ercelik¹, Lucy Core¹, Yueming Gao¹, Matthew Longo², Valeria Vinogradova^1,5, Barbara Manini^1,6; ¹University College London, ²Birkbeck, University of London, ³King's College London, ⁴University of Kent, ⁵HSE University, ⁶University of Derby

We studied how sensory experience shapes cognitive processing in the brain, and the function of cortical ‘sensory’ regions. Specifically, we investigated whether brain regions typically considered ‘sensory’ can implement higher-order cognitive functions when their main input is absent or significantly reduced. Previous fMRI research has suggested a specialisation for executive processing in the auditory cortex of deaf individuals (Cardin et al., 2018; Ding et al., 2015; Manini et al., 2022; Zimmermann et al., 2021). It is unknown whether increased activations during executive function tasks in deaf individuals reflect: i) a sensory processing function, such as extracting information about relevant sensory features, or ii) processing of task-specific information, such as coding task rules or modulating attentional states. To distinguish between these hypotheses, we conducted an fMRI delay-to-match experiment in either the visual or somatosensory modality in deaf (N=13) and hearing (N=18) individuals. Representational Similarity Analysis (RSA) showed that the auditory cortex of deaf individuals contains information about higher-level processes such as task and sensory modality. We also found significant representations of somatosensory frequency. Critically, task and modality representations were also found in the auditory cortex of hearing individuals, suggesting that plasticity effects rely on the enhancement of representations that are present in hearing individuals, rather than through the implementation of novel ones. Overall, we show that sensory experience shapes cognitive processing and the function of sensory regions in the brain, and that the “functional destiny” of cortical regions can be shaped by early sensory experience.

Topic Area: EXECUTIVE PROCESSES: Other