Two Forms of Knowledge Representations in the Human Brain

Sensory experience shapes what and how knowledge is stored in the brain-our knowledge about the color of roses depends in part on the activity of color-responsive neurons based on experiences of seeing roses. We compared the brain basis of color knowledge in congenitally (or early) blind individuals, whose color knowledge can only be obtained through language descriptions and/or cognitive inference, to that of sighted individuals whose color-knowledge benefits from both sensory experience and language. We found that some regions support color knowledge only in the sighted, whereas a region in the left dorsal anterior temporal lobe supports object-color knowledge in both the blind and sighted groups, indicating the existence of a sensory-independent knowledge coding system in both groups. Thus, there are (at least) two forms of object knowledge representations in the human brain: sensory-derived and language- and cognition-derived knowledge, supported by different brain systems.