Preserved visual categorical coding in the ventral occipito-temporal cortex despite transient early blindness and permanent alteration in the functional response of early visual regions
Bibliographic record
Abstract
It has been suggested that a transient period of postnatal visual deprivation affect the development of object categorization in the visual system. Here we overturn this assumption by demonstrating typical categorical coding in the ventral occipito-temporal cortex (VOTC) despite early visual deprivation and pervasive alteration in the functional response in the early visual cortex (EVC). We used fMRI to characterize the brain response to five visual categories (faces, bodies, objects, buildings and words) in a group of cataract-reversal individuals who experienced a short and transient period of blindness early in life, and in a group of control participants with typical visual development. Using a combination of uni- and multi-variate analyses, we show that the encoding of low-level visual properties of our stimuli is impaired in EVC in cataract-reversal participants, while there is a preservation of the categorical response in the VOTC. When altering the visual properties of our stimuli to mimic in controls the deficit of EVC response of the cataract, we observe a cascading alteration of the categorical coding from EVC to VOTC that is not observed in the cataract-reversal group. Our results suggest that we do not need visual experience early in life to develop the typical visual categorical organization in VOTC, even in the presence of impaired low-level visual processing in EVC. These results challenge the classical view of a feedforward development of categorical selectivity in VOTC according to which the categorical organization of high-level regions depends on low-level visual protomaps.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".