Fairhall Scott L, Porter Katharine B, Bellucci Claudia, Gobbini M Ida
Center for Mind/Brain Sciences, University of Trento, Trento, Italy.
Department of Psychology, Harvard, Cambridge, MA, USA.
Sci Rep. 2025 Sep 26;15(1):33084. doi: 10.1038/s41598-025-16840-6.
Recognising a familiar individual involves the spontaneous retrieval of person-specific information, engaging a distributed cortical network for person knowledge. While the role of this system is well established for visual face perception, it remains unclear whether its recruitment depends on visual experience. Here, we investigated the neural basis of voice-identity processing in congenitally blind and sighted individuals using fMRI. Participants listened to personally familiar and unfamiliar voices while performing an identity recognition task. Familiar voices elicited stronger responses across groups in the temporoparietal junction (TPJ), medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), and right middle temporal gyrus. Of these, the TPJ and anterior mPFC-regions typically implicated in the network for person knowledge-showed a more pronounced familiarity effect in congenitally blind participants than in sighted controls. Multivariate analysis further revealed stronger identity-specific representations in the blind in the right TPJ, adjacent to the region showing enhanced univariate responses, as well as in the left intraparietal sulcus. These findings demonstrate that voice-identity cues alone can drive spontaneous access to person knowledge in the absence of visual input in both the normally sighted and the blind, but engagement of this network is stronger in the blind. These results indicate that the network for person knowledge develops in a modality-flexible manner shaped by the social demands of interpersonal interaction.
识别熟悉的个体涉及到自动检索特定于个人的信息，这需要一个用于人物知识的分布式皮层网络的参与。虽然这个系统在视觉面部感知中的作用已经得到充分确立，但尚不清楚其激活是否依赖于视觉体验。在这里，我们使用功能磁共振成像（fMRI）研究了先天性盲人及有视力个体中语音身份识别的神经基础。参与者在执行身份识别任务时，聆听熟悉和不熟悉的声音。熟悉的声音在颞顶联合区（TPJ）、内侧前额叶皮层（mPFC）和右侧颞中回中引发了两组更强烈的反应。其中，TPJ和前内侧前额叶皮层（通常与人物知识网络有关）在先天性盲人参与者中比有视力的对照组表现出更明显的熟悉效应。多变量分析进一步显示，在右侧TPJ（与显示增强单变量反应的区域相邻）以及左侧顶内沟中，盲人中存在更强的身份特异性表征。这些发现表明，仅语音身份线索就能在正常视力者和盲人中驱动在无视觉输入的情况下自动获取人物知识，但该网络在盲人中的激活更强。这些结果表明，人物知识网络以一种由人际互动的社会需求塑造的模态灵活方式发展。
