📄 Impact of a transient neonatal visual deprivation on the development of the ventral occipito-temporal cortex in humans
by Mattioni et al. (2025)
rdcu.be/eQjMH

This work was possible thanks to the dedication of an incredible team — across labs, countries, and expertise.
A huge thank you to the co-authors:
[M.Rezk, X.Gao, J.Nam, Z-X.Liu, @remigau.bsky.social, V.Goffaux, @costantinoai.bsky.social, H.Op de Beeck, T.Lewis, D.Maurer, @olicolli.bsky.social ].

This challenges the classic “cascade” model of visual development — the idea that if early vision is impaired, higher areas must fail too.
Instead, our data show that the ventral visual stream can reorganize and recover.

Together, these results reveal different sensitive periods across the visual system:
• Early visual areas need input early on to develop normally
• Higher-level regions can recover from early loss if later visual experience is rich enough

In sum:
Brief blindness right after birth permanently alters low level visual processing in EVC — but higher-level areas (VOTC) remain surprisingly resilient.
Although early deprivation disrupts basic feature encoding, the brain can develop normal categorical representations later in life.

To dig deeper, we trained deep neural networks on degraded visual input to model how vision develops after early deprivation.
The networks mirrored our brain findings:
– Early layers (V1-like) stayed impaired
– Higher layers (VOTC-like) recovered normal categorical coding

In addition, we ran a control experiment where typical participants viewed altered images to mimic the visual deficits of the cataract group.
Result: this degraded vision disrupted both EVC and VOTC — unlike in the cataract-reversal participants, where only EVC was affected.

We also tested whether these effects were due to the participants’ current visual quality (e.g., reduced acuity, nystagmus).
Using the deepMReye toolbox, we tracked and controlled for eye movements ensuring that our brain results weren’t driven by differences in gaze behavior.

We then tested within-category decoding: Can the brain tell apart individual images within a category?
Cataract-reversal participants showed reduced decoding accuracy in EVC across all categories tested.
This indicates a broad low-level visual impairment, not tied to any specific category.

Representational similarity analyses showed:
• EVC matched low-level visual models less in cataract-reversal participants
• VOTC maintained normal categorical structure
Indicating impaired early visual coding but preserved downstream category representation.

We used fMRI to study how “cataract-reversal” individuals process visual categories—faces, bodies, houses, tools, and words—compared with sighted controls.
The focus: how early deprivation affects low- and high-level visual processing, from EVC (early visual cortex) to VOTC (ventral occ-temp cort).