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Neural specialization for living things does not require visual experience
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Poster E22 in Poster Session E, Thursday, October 26, 10:15 am - 12:00 pm CEST, Espace Vieux-Port
Miriam Hauptman1, Giulia Elli1, Rashi Pant1,2, Marina Bedny1; 1Johns Hopkins University, 2Universität Hamburg
A key question in philosophy and cognitive science concerns the role of sensory experience in concept formation. Visual experience is thought to play a particularly important role in the acquisition of knowledge about ‘living things,’ such as animals and plants, compared to inanimate entities, such as places and artifacts (Kim et al., 2019). According to one influential view, semantic deficits for ‘living things’ occur because of damage to visual knowledge (Warrington & Shallice, 1984; Farah & McClelland, 1991; Gaffan & Heywood, 1993). Previous studies have failed to find neural specialization for living things in adults born blind (Bi, Wang, & Caramazza, 2016). However, these studies focus on activity in ventral occipito-temporal cortex, which even in sighted people responds only to images of living things (Mahon et al., 2009). Several recent experiments have implicated the dorsal precuneus in representing abstract animacy concepts among sighted individuals (Fairhall et al., 2013a, 2013b; Deen et al., 2022). We tested the hypothesis that higher-order responses to living things would be preserved in blindness using multivariate and univariate functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Sighted (n=22) and age and education matched congenitally blind (n=21) adults heard pairs of nouns and verbs in a blocked design and judged how similar in meaning the word pairs were on a 4-point scale while undergoing fMRI. Stimuli were matched for length and familiarity, and were previously validated in a separate fMRI experiment with sighted adults (Elli et al., 2019). Analysis focused on the comparison between ‘living’ nouns (birds, mammals) and inanimate nouns (manmade places, natural places). We first looked at responses to living and inanimate entities in regions with a general preference for entities (nouns > verbs): left precuneus, inferior temporal cortex (IT) and the inferior parietal lobule (IP). A linear support vector machine classifier (Hanke et al., 2009) trained on multivariate patterns of activity in this network classified living from inanimate entities in both blind and sighted people. Further, when the classifier made errors, it confused birds with mammals more often than with places. These findings indicate that living things are neurally separable from inanimate entities. Next, a direct univariate contrast between living > inanimate entities revealed a preference for living things in a dorsal sub-region of the precuneus in both sighted and blind participants (cluster-corrected at p<.01 family wise error rate). This animacy response overlaps with previously reported responses to animate entities in the dorsal precuneus of sighted participants (Fairhall & Caramazza, 2013). Conversely, preferential responses to inanimate places (inanimate > living entities) were observed in medial ventral temporal cortex near the canonical location of the parahippocampal place area in both groups (Weiner et al., 2017). In conclusion, we find evidence for a robust dissociation of living things and inanimate entities throughout the entity-responsive network, particularly in dorsal precuneus, in both sighted and blind individuals. Our results suggest that neural specialization for living things does not require visual experience, pointing to the amodal nature and possibly innate basis of animacy representations.
Topic Areas: Meaning: Lexical Semantics, Language Development/Acquisition