Sensory substitution devices (SSDs) can represent the structure of visual space through sound. To determine whether this representation is topographically organized in the congenitally blind brain, we used NORDIC de-noising and population receptive field mapping (pRF) to correlate functional brain changes to changes in sound stimulus verticality (frequency) and laterality (panning/timing) following SSD principles. We show that NORDIC significantly increased temporal signal-to-noise ratios and activation areas in subjects’ auditory cortices. PRF revealed that auditory topographic maps representing verticality and laterality emerged in occipital-parietal cortices of 3/7 congenitally blind subjects only after 10-minutes of SSD training, indicating rapid cross-modal cortical recruitment.
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