Figure 1. Main effects of task in sighted and congenitally blind participants.

The ventral object processing stream was functionally defined as all voxels that were significant in the omnibus test (random effects analysis) in sighted participants viewing pictures, and that were at or below a z coordinate in Talairach space of 6 (resulting mask = 131,602 mm³). The contrast map for the omnibus test for viewing pictures within the functionally defined ventral stream is shown in the right panel. The left and middle panels show the omnibus analysis when sighted (left) and congenitally blind (middle) participants performed the auditory size-judgment task (collapsing across animal and nonliving stimuli). As can be seen, for the auditory size-judgment task there was a pattern of relatively decreased BOLD responses in early visual regions in sighted participants but increased BOLD responses in congenitally blind participants.