Auditory areas are recruited for naturalistic visual meaning in early deaf people

Maria Zimmermann (), Rhodri Cusack, Marina Bedny and Marcin Szwed ()
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Maria Zimmermann: Jagiellonian University
Rhodri Cusack: Trinity College Institute of Neuroscience
Marina Bedny: Johns Hopkins University
Marcin Szwed: Jagiellonian University

Nature Communications, 2024, vol. 15, issue 1, 1-13

Abstract: Abstract Congenital deafness enhances responses of auditory cortices to non-auditory tasks, yet the nature of the reorganization is not well understood. Here, naturalistic stimuli are used to induce neural synchrony across early deaf and hearing individuals. Participants watch a silent animated film in an intact version and three versions with gradually distorted meaning. Differences between groups are observed in higher-order auditory cortices in all stimuli, with no statistically significant effects in the primary auditory cortex. Comparison between levels of scrambling revealed a heterogeneity of function in secondary auditory areas. Both hemispheres show greater synchrony in the deaf than in the hearing participants for the intact movie and high-level variants. However, only the right hemisphere shows an increased inter-subject synchrony in the deaf people for the low-level movie variants. An event segmentation validates these results: the dynamics of the right secondary auditory cortex in the deaf people consist of shorter-length events with more transitions than the left. Our results reveal how deaf individuals use their auditory cortex to process visual meaning.

Date: 2024
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DOI: 10.1038/s41467-024-52383-6

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