The Brain Network Underlying the Recognition of Hand Gestures in the Blind: The Supramodal Role of the Extrastriate Body Area
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The visual perception of others' body parts is critical for understanding and imitating their behavior. The visual cortex in humans includes the extrastriate body area (EBA), which is a large portion of the occipitotemporal cortex that is selectively responsive to visually perceived body parts. Previous neuroimaging studies showed that the EBA not only receives sensory inputs regarding others' body information but also receives kinesthetic feedback regarding one's own actions. This finding raised the possibility that the EBA could be formed via nonvisual sensory modalities. However, the effect of visual deprivation on the formation of the EBA has remained largely unknown. Here, we used fMRI to investigate the effect of vision loss on the development of the EBA. Blind and sighted human subjects performed equally well in a haptic-identification task involving three categories of objects (hand shapes, toy cars, and teapots). The superior part (i.e., the middle temporal gyrus and angular gyrus) of the EBA and the supramarginal gyrus showed greater sensitivity to recognized hand shapes than to inanimate objects, regardless of the sensory modality and visual experience. Unlike the superior part of the EBA, the sensitivity of the inferior part (i.e., the inferior temporal sulcus and middle occipital gyrus) depended on visual experience. However, this vision-dependent sensitivity explained minor individual differences in hand-recognition performance. These results indicate that nonvisual modalities drive the development of the cortical network underlying the recognition of hand gestures with a node in the visual cortex.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".