Fig. 2: The effect in area V5/MT in blind individuals is driven by successful classification of activity patterns for concrete nouns and verbs.

Results of support vector machine classification of activity patterns for noun blocks and verb blocks, performed separately for concrete, abstract, and pseudo word categories, in area V5/MT in congenitally blind (n = 20) and sighted (n = 20) participants. Statistical testing against classification chance level was performed separately in each participant group using the permutation procedure, in which the actual results were compared with the null distribution of 1000 classification values obtained with the labels of noun blocks and verb blocks randomly reassigned. The results were corrected for multiple comparisons across the word categories, within each group (Bonferroni correction for 3 tests). The statistically significant results were found only for the classification of concrete nouns and verbs in the blind group (mean classification accuracy = 55.9%, *p = 0.024). Error bars represent the standard error of the mean calculated across the results for individual participants in each group. The a priori chance classification level (accuracy = 50%) is marked with black lines. Source data are provided as a Source Data file.