Stimuli, experimental design, pattern extraction and multivariate analysis framework.

A) We presented eight braille letters (B,C,D,L,M,N,V,Z) to participants on braille cells. Two additional letters (E and O) served as catch trials and were excluded from all analyses.

B) Top: During the fMRI session, braille letters were presented for 500ms with an inter-stimulus interval (ISI) of 2500ms. Participants were instructed to respond to catch trials by pressing a button with their foot. Bottom: During a separate EEG session, braille letters were presented for 500ms. The ISI following regular trials lasted 500ms, the ISI following catch trials lasted 1,100ms to avoid movement confounds. Participants were instructed to respond to catch trials by pressing a foot pedal.

C) In fMRI, we extracted voxel-wise activations for every region of interest (ROI). In EEG, we extracted channel-wise activations for every time point. In both cases, this resulted in one response vector per letter and per experimental run.

D) For both fMRI and EEG, we divided pattern vectors into training (4 pseudo-runs) and test (1 pseudo-run) sets. For every pair of braille letters (e.g., B and V), we trained a support vector machine (SVM) to classify between pattern vectors related to the presentation of both letters read with the same hand. We then tested the SVM on the left-out pattern vectors related to the presentation of the same two letters read with the same hand (within-hand classification) or with the other hand (across-hand classification). The resulting pairwise decoding accuracies were aggregated in a decoding accuracy matrix that is symmetric along the diagonal, with the diagonal itself being undefined. We interpret the within-hand matrix (black) as a measure of sensory and perceptual braille letter representations. We interpret the across-hand matrix (green) as a measure of perceptual braille letter representations. We derive the measure of sensory braille letter representations (blue) by subtracting one matrix from the other.

Spatial dynamics of braille letter representations.

A) Rendering of regions of interests associated with tactile processing (S1: primary somatosensory cortex, S2: secondary somatosensory cortex, aIPS: anterior intraparietal sulcus, pIPS: posterior intraparietal sulcus, insula) and sighted reading (EVC: early visual cortex, V4: visual area 4, LOC: lateral occipital complex, LFA: letter form area, VWFA: visual word form area).

B) Sensory and perceptual (left), sensory (middle) and perceptual (right) braille letters representations in tactile processing and sighted reading ROIs (N = 15, two-tailed Wilcoxon signed-rank test, P < 0.05, FDR corrected; Stars below bars indicate significance above chance. Error bars represent 95% confidence intervals. Dots represent single subject data.

C) fMRI searchlight results for sensory (blue) and perceptual (green) braille letter representations (N = 15, height threshold P< 0.001, cluster-level FWE corrected P < 0.05, colored voxels indicate significance). Results for combined sensory and perceptual representations are in Supplementary Figure 1.

Temporal dynamics of braille letter representations.

A) EEG results for sensory and perceptual (black), sensory (blue) and perceptual (green) braille letter representations in time. Shaded areas around curves indicate standard error of the mean. Significance onsets and their 95% confidence intervals are indicated by dots and horizontal lines below curves (color-coded as curves, N = 11, 1,000 bootstraps, one-tailed Wilcoxon signed-rank test, P < 0.05, FDR corrected).

B) EEG searchlight results for sensory and perceptual (top), sensory (middle) and perceptual (bottom) braille letter representations in EEG channel space (sampled down to 10ms resolution) in 100ms intervals. Significant electrodes are marked with black circles (N = 11, one-tailed Wilcoxon signed-rank test, P < 0.05, FDR corrected across electrodes and time points).

Representational similarity of braille letters in neural and behavioral measures.

A) For fMRI (top) and EEG (bottom), we formed representational dissimilarity matrices (RDMs) from pairwise decoding accuracies. In the behavioral experiment (middle), we presented two braille letters (e.g., B and V) on two braille cells. For all combinations, we asked participants to read both braille letters with the same hand (e.g., right) and verbally rate their similarity on a scale from 1-7. We formed the behavioral RDM from those perceptual similarity judgements for every letter pair. We then correlated the behavioral RDM (averaged over participants) with neural RDMs (subject specific) using Spearman’s R.

B) Results of RSA relating fMRI and behavior in ROIs that showed significant sensory (left) and perceptual (right) braille letter representations in fMRI (see. Fig. 2) (N = 15, two-tailed Wilcoxon signed-rank test, P < 0.05, FDR corrected). Stars below bars indicate significance above chance. Error bars represent 95% confidence intervals. Dots represent single subject data.

C) Results of RSA relating EEG and behavior for sensory (blue) and perceptual (green) representations. Shaded areas around curves indicate standard error of the mean. Significance onsets and their 95% confidence intervals are indicated by dots and lines below curves (N = 11, 1,000 bootstraps, one-tailed Wilcoxon signed-rank test, P < 0.05, FDR corrected, color-coded as result curves).