Social vision expands into auditory cortices of people born deaf: evidence from naturalistic film and encoding models

In deaf adults (n=24) watching a 35-minute silent animated film, auditory cortices show enhanced encoding of visual information, with social interactions as the strongest predictor.

• Why it matters: Experience-dependent plasticity in auditory cortex is unclear under naturalistic, socially rich inputs, especially how visual social features map onto auditory networks after deafness.
• What they did: Using naturalistic fMRI with voxel-wise encoding, the team annotated film motion and social cues via machine vision and human coding, then compared deaf (n=24) versus hearing (n=22) groups.
• The result: Deaf participants exhibited a right-lateralized hierarchy and systematic anatomical organization in auditory networks, where social interactions most strongly predicted neural activity and showed the strongest enhancement.

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