Sensory cortices of individuals who are congenitally deprived of a sense can undergo considerable plasticity and be recruited to process information from the senses that remain intact. 

Fang Fang's group has explored whether the auditory cortex of congenitally deaf individuals represents visual field location of a stimulus – a dimension that is represented in early visual areas. They used fMRI to measure neural activity in auditory and visual cortices of congenitally deaf and hearing humans while they observed stimuli typically used for mapping visual field preferences in visual cortex. The study found that the location of a visual stimulus can be successfully decoded from the patterns of neural activity in auditory cortex of congenitally deaf but not hearing individuals. This is particularly true for locations within the horizontal plane, and within peripheral vision. These data show that the representations stored within neuroplastically-changed auditory cortex can align with dimensions that are typically of visual cortex.

Almeida J., He D., Chen Q., Mahon, B.Z., Zhang F., Gonçalves Ó. F., Fang F. and Bi Y. (2015) Decoding visual location from neural patterns in the auditory cortex of the congenitally deaf. Psychological Science .(in press)