Functional connectivity of secondary visual cortices.

(A) Bar graph shows functional connectivity (r) of secondary visual cortices (blue) to non-visual sensory motor areas (purple) and prefrontal cortices (green), averaged across occipital, PFC and sensory-motor ROIs (A1 and S1/M1) in sighted adults, blind adults and sighted infants. Regions of interest (ROI) displayed on the left. Note that regions extend to ventral surface, not shown. See Supplementary Figure S7 for the full views of ROIs. (B) Circle plots represent the connectivity of secondary visual cortices to non-visual networks, min-max normalized to [0,1], i.e., as a proportion. OC: occipital cortices; MTH: math-responsive region; LG: language-responsive region; EF: executive function-responsive (response-conflict) region.

Functional connectivity of primary visual cortices (V1).

Regions of interest (ROI) displayed on the upper. Bar graph shows functional connectivity (r) of V1 to non-visual sensory motor areas (purple) and prefrontal cortices (green), averaged across three PFC ROIs and sensory-motor ROIs (S1/M1 and A1).

Within hemisphere vs. across hemisphere functional connectivity.

Bar graph shows within hemisphere (blue) and across hemisphere (orange) functional connectivity (r coefficient of resting state correlations) of secondary visual (left) and V1 (right) to prefrontal cortices in sighted adults, blind adults, and sighted infants. Blind adults show a larger difference than any of the other groups.

Occipito-frontal functional connectivity.

Bar graph shows across functional connectivity of different sub-regions of prefrontal (PFC) and occipital cortex (OCC) in sighted adults, blind adults, and sighted infants. Sub-regions (regions of interest) were defined based on task-based responses in a separate dataset of sighted (frontal) and blind (frontal and occipital) adults (Kanjlia et al., 2016, 2021; Lane et al., 2015). PFC/OCC-MATH: math-responsive regions were more active when solving math equations than comprehending sentences. PFC/OC-LANG: language-responsive regions were more active when comprehending sentences than solving math equations (Kanjlia et al., 2016, 2021; Lane et al., 2015). In blind adults these regions show biases in connectivity related to their function i.e., language-responsive PFC is more correlated with language responsive OCC. No such pattern is observed in infants. See Supplementary Figure S10 for connectivity matrix.