Neural specialization for ‘visual’ concepts emerges in the absence of vision

The dataset contains anonymized structural and functional fMRI data from 21 congenitally blind adults and 22 sighted adults. All blind participants had minimal light perception from birth at most. These participants are blind due to conditions affecting the eye or optic nerve rather than brain damage. Cause of blindness information is provided in the aggregate to protect participant privacy. Both blind and sighted participants had no known cognitive or neurological disabilities, as determined through self-report, and were matched on age and years of education. Participants underwent 8 functional scans. During the scans, participants heard pairs of words and judged how similar the two words were in meaning on a scale from 1 (not at all similar) to 4 (very similar), indicating their responses via button press. Word stimuli consisted of 18 words in each of 8 semantic categories: 4 categories of entities/nouns (birds, mammals, manmade places, natural places), and 4 categories of events/verbs (light emission, sound emission, hand-related actions, mouth-related actions). Sighted participants wore light-excluding blindfolds to ensure uniform light conditions across groups during the scans. T1-weighted anatomical images were also collected. Only the structural and functional images in standard space were shared in this project, in accordance with IRB requirements. For details on image acquisition parameters and data preprocessing methods, please refer to the data description file.