Recruitment of the occipital cortex by arithmetic processing follows computational bias in the congenitally blind

Abstract

Arithmetic reasoning activates the occipital cortex of congenitally blind people (CB). This activation of visual areas may highlight the functional flexibility of occipital regions deprived of their dominant inputs or relate to the intrinsic computational role of specific occipital regions. We contrasted these competing hypotheses by characterizing the brain activity of CB and sighted participants while performing subtraction, multiplication and a control letter task. In both groups, subtraction selectively activated a bilateral dorsal network commonly activated during spatial processing. Multiplication triggered activity in temporal regions thought to participate in memory retrieval. No between-group difference was observed for the multiplication task whereas subtraction induced enhanced activity in the right dorsal occipital cortex of the blind individuals only. As this area overlaps with regions showing selective tuning to auditory spatial processing and exhibits increased functional connectivity with a dorsal "spatial" network, our results suggest that the recruitment of occipital regions during high-level cognition in the blind actually relates to the intrinsic computational role of the activated regions.

Keywords: Blindness; Mental arithmetic; Multiplication; Neural correlates; Subtraction.