Sensitive Period for Cognitive Repurposing of Human Visual Cortex

Abstract

Studies of sensory loss are a model for understanding the functional flexibility of human cortex. In congenital blindness, subsets of visual cortex are recruited during higher-cognitive tasks, such as language and math tasks. Is such dramatic functional repurposing possible throughout the lifespan or restricted to sensitive periods in development? We compared visual cortex function in individuals who lost their vision as adults (after age 17) to congenitally blind and sighted blindfolded adults. Participants took part in resting-state and task-based fMRI scans during which they solved math equations of varying difficulty and judged the meanings of sentences. Blindness at any age caused "visual" cortices to synchronize with specific frontoparietal networks at rest. However, in task-based data, visual cortices showed regional specialization for math and language and load-dependent activity only in congenital blindness. Thus, despite the presence of long-range functional connectivity, cognitive repurposing of human cortex is limited by sensitive periods.

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