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. 2018 Dec 7;9:5250. doi: 10.1038/s41467-018-07574-3

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© The Author(s) 2018

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

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Fig. 2 — Imperceptible concepts processing is supported by the left dorsal ATL. a To probe for the effect of sensory feature perceptibility, we compared brain activity in people blind from birth and sighted controls, in response to concepts which have external referents in the world, but are perceptible only through the visual sensory modality, and are thus imperceptible to a blind person (e.g. “rainbow”) as compared to concepts whose referents are sensorially perceptible also to the blind (through other modalities; e.g., “rain”). An area which is sensitive to imperceptibility of concepts should respond differently in the two groups for this contrast, as visually-dominant concepts are fully perceptible to the sighted subjects. The ANOVA effect of Group X Imperceptibility interaction across content domains shows two clusters in dorsal ATL which respond differently in the blind and sighted to the presented words based on their perceptibility (adATL and pdATL; data from Exp. 1). b The anterior cluster shown in Fig. 2A, labeled adATL, shows a preference for imperceptible concepts across concept domains (object features, astral phenomena and scenes) only in the blind group (data from independent Exp. 2). Error bars represent standard error of the difference between means for the perceptible and imperceptible words in each content domain. Asterisks represent statistically significant difference between perceptible and imperceptible concepts (paired t test, t(22) > 3.505, p < 0.05, Bonferroni corrected for multiple comparisons). c Preferential activation for imperceptible vs perceptible concepts in the blind group, affects the left dorsal ATL (data from Exp. 1). d The dorsal ATL cluster showing preferential activation for imperceptible concepts (shown in Fig. 2C) shows a preference for imperceptible concepts across concept domains (object features, astral phenomena and scenes) only in the blind group (data from independent Exp. 2). Error bars represent standard error of the difference between means for the perceptible and imperceptible words in each content domain. In addition to the significant main imperceptibility effect in the blind, asterisks represent statistically significant difference between perceptible and imperceptible concepts (paired t test, t(22) > 3.505, p < 0.05, Bonferroni corrected for multiple comparisons)