| Separated ventral and dorsal streams have been proposed to process sound pattern and spatial information respectively.Although the dual-pathway model is widely held,it remains controversial how much independence two neural pathway enjoy and whether visual experiences can influence the distinct cortical organizational scheme.Furthermore,most of the existing researches on sound perception are based on univariate analysis and often lack a pattern information.In this study,both sighted and blind subjects were recruited,and functional magnetic resonance imaging(fMRI)data were collected whilst participants engaged in a sound localization and identification task.Creatively,we used weighted representational similarity analysis(RSA)to explore the neural representations of four predefined regions of interest(ROIs).We found that anterior superior temporal gyrus(aSTG)and inferior frontal junction(IFJ)were more related to the sound pattern,while posterior superior temporal gyrus(pSTG)and inferior parietal lobe(IPL)preferred spatial information.A searchlight RSA procedure was then conducted across the whole brain,and the distinct networks were observed even in blind subjects,indicating that visual experiences may not have an influence on this functional dissociation and our brain may be organized as task-specific and modality-independent strategies.We also observed the cortical reorganization in blind subjects that some traditional visual areas,such as middle occipital gyrus(MOG),were recruited to process auditory information.Our findings examined the distinct cortical networks that abstractly encoded different sound categories and position from the multivariate perspective,and suggested the need to refine the auditory dual stream hypothesis. |
