Cerebral Cortex

The early development of the prefrontal cortex is crucial for higher cognitive functions. However, current research presents inconsistent findings regarding whether intra-prefrontal connectivity increases or decreases in infants younger than six months. Do dynamic changes in connection strength across different states over time carry information about prefrontal maturation? This study used functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to record prefrontal brain activity in 48 healthy infants aged 1-8 months during natural sleep and auditory stimulation. By analyzing the fluctuations in frequency-domain characteristics of functional connectivity (FC) and various brain network properties, we found that: under auditory stimulation, the intensity of FC fluctuations in the ultra-low frequency range was positively correlated with age; while in the resting state, the fluctuation intensity of network properties in relatively higher frequency bands decreased with age. Furthermore, auditory stimulation reconfigured the energy distribution of network fluctuations, shifting it towards higher frequency bands. These results suggest that the early development of the infant prefrontal internal network is characterized by state-dependent optimization of its dynamic fluctuation properties, shedding light on the developmental tuning of functional network dynamics in infancy.

Emotional prosody processing involves a widespread network of brain regions, but the specific roles of the cerebellum and basal ganglia in explicit and implicit tasks are not well known or understood. This study investigated how the cerebellum and basal ganglia contribute to explicit (emotion categorization) and implicit (gender categorization) processing of emotional prosody, namely when attention is directly versus implicitly oriented towards the emotion of the voice stimuli, respectively. Twenty-eight healthy French-speaking participants (average age: 65 years old) underwent high-resolution functional MRI while performing explicit and implicit vocal emotion processing tasks. Neuroimaging results revealed--and replicated--that both tasks recruited a widespread network, including the superior temporal cortex, inferior frontal cortex, primary motor and somatosensory cortices, basal ganglia, and cerebellum. The explicit task elicited stronger activations in the basal ganglia (caudate nucleus, putamen) and cerebellar regions (Crus I/II, lobules VI, VIIb, and X), consistent with higher cognitive control demands. In contrast, the implicit task was associated with activations in cerebellar lobules IV-V, VI, VIII, and IX, along with the thalamus. Regression-based functional connectivity analyses further demonstrated stronger connectivity between the right cerebellar lobule IX and the putamen, as well as the cerebellar vermis (XII), particularly during implicit processing. These findings highlight the distinct contributions of the cerebellum and basal ganglia to emotional prosody processing, with explicit tasks engaging associative and cognitive control networks, while implicit tasks rely more on sensorimotor and automatic neural processing mechanisms.

How does the functionality of the cortex change from infancy to adulthood to support the developmental cognitive shift from learners to performers? Cortical adaptation is a simple neural mechanism which plays a key role in learning and memory encoding, but little is known about how it develops across the lifespan. Both infants and adults have been found to respond differently to repeating audio and visual stimuli, suggesting differences in cortical adaptation throughout development. However, studies typically approach these populations through different paradigms and interpret the results in terms of different cognitive models. To overcome these issues, we implemented an identical paradigm across all age groups to examine cortical adaptation and its developmental trajectory. We used functional near infra-red spectroscopy (fNIRS) to chart how different regions in the infant, child and adult brain respond to repeating audiovisual stimuli at varying inter-stimulus intervals (ISIs), using cortical adaptation as a proxy for implicit memory dynamics. We found faster recovery from adaptation in infants compared to children and adults. Specifically, there was an interaction between stimulus presentation rate and age in the right temporal, left parietal and occipital cortical areas. There was also a developmental progression in functional connectivity, with infants displaying significantly lower correlations between regions of interest than children and adults. Taken together, we suggest these findings may reflect the developmental trajectory of cortical adaptation from a learning system optimized for maximal information intake and minimal filtering of stimuli to a specialized integrative system that efficiently filters and adapts to information. HighlightsO_LICortical adaptation is a fundamental mechanism involved in memory and learning, but not much is known about how it develops throughout the lifespan. C_LIO_LIAn identical fNIRS paradigm across 3 different age groups reveals significant differences in cortical adaptation between infants, children and adults. C_LIO_LIFunctional connectivity revealed foundational connections present from infancy, growing stronger and into a specialized adaptation system with age. C_LI These findings suggest a developmental transition from a system optimized for maximal information intake to a specialized learning system, capable of filtering redundant information.

When bilinguals frequently switch between their first (L1) and second (L2) languages during speech production, we usually observe two phenomena: (i) language switch cost, where switching to a different language is more difficult than staying in the same one, and (ii) reversed language dominance, where L1 production becomes slower than L2 production. These effects are thought to reflect language control mechanisms, yet the underlying neural bases remain debated. In this study, we addressed this question by using the precision functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) based on functional localization. Forty-one Polish-English bilinguals performed a language switching task (LST), in which they named pictures in L1 or L2 based on color cues. We investigated mechanisms behind two indices of language control commonly observed in the LST. First, we asked whether the domain-general resources supporting language switch cost overlap with nonverbal task switch cost. Second, we asked whether reversed language dominance reflects changes in language activation in the language-specific system, or whether it is related to increased engagement of domain-general control mechanisms. Results indicated that the language switch cost and nonverbal task switch cost share overlapping domain-general neural mechanisms. Similar to the language switch cost, reversed language dominance primarily engages domain-general processes rather than language-specific resources. HighlightsO_LIfMRI combined with functional localization approach is implemented to examine the neural mechanisms underlying language switch cost and reversed language dominance. C_LIO_LILanguage switch cost relies on neural mechanisms shared with nonverbal switch cost within the Multiple Demand network. C_LIO_LIReversed language dominance is primarily supported by the domain-general rather than the language-specific mechanisms. C_LIO_LIDomain-general neural mechanisms play a pivotal role in bilingual language switching in speech production. C_LI

An essential aspect of human cognition is the ability to explicitly think about semantic relations between concepts. Neuroimaging studies have found that individual concepts are encoded by distributed patterns of cortical activity, but relatively little is known about how semantic relations between concepts are encoded in the brain. Some theoretical models suggest that relation representations are embedded within concept representations, while others suggest that relation representations are independent of any specific concept pair. We designed a study to compare how semantic relations and concepts are encoded across the cerebral cortex. To characterize how relations are encoded across cortex, fMRI was used to record brain activity while six participants each answered over one thousand questions about different semantic relations. We find that relations are encoded independently of the specific concepts that are connected in any particular instance of the relation. Our results further suggest that relations and concepts are represented in the same set of cortical regions, and that, within these regions, each location is preferentially selective for specific relations. Overall, these results suggest that in the human cerebral cortex, relations and concepts may have the same type of functional representation.

Creativity is a hallmark of human cognition, characterized by the ability to connect seemingly distant concepts or ideas. Existing theories suggest that remote thinking can be achieved either spontaneously (constrained by the structure of semantic memory) or in a goal-directed manner (constrained by a creative goal). The present study investigates the neural correlates of goal-directed remote thinking, defined as the intentional production of semantically distant associations. Using a simple word-to-word association task comprising both a spontaneous condition and a goal-directed creative condition, we investigated Goal-directed Remoteness as the extra semantic distance traveled away from spontaneous responses when instructed to think creatively. Task-based functional MRI in 38 healthy young adults identified brain regions whose activation scaled with Goal-directed Remoteness. The results revealed that activity in the rostromedial and dorsomedial prefrontal cortex and the right cerebellar Crus I & II was positively modulated by Goal-directed Remoteness. Control analyses confirmed the robustness of these findings independently of the cue-words semantic or linguistic properties. Follow-up seed-based resting-state functional connectivity analyses characterized the intrinsic connectivity profiles of the revealed regions. They showed that rostromedial and dorsomedial prefrontal and cerebellar Crus I & II regions formed a functionally interconnected network primarily overlapping with the default-mode network (DMN). Our findings challenge the traditional view of the DMN as supporting only passive or spontaneous cognition. Instead, they reveal a prefronto-cerebellar DMN subnetwork supporting goal-directed remote thinking, a key component of creative cognition. Within this network, the rostromedial and dorsomedial prefrontal cortex and cerebellar Crus I & II play an active role in the intentional generation of connections between distant concepts.

Spatialization in working memory refers to the spatial coding of non-spatial information along a mental horizontal line when encoding verbal material. This phenomenon is thought to support working memory by facilitating order encoding. Although it has been observed for both visually and auditorily presented stimuli, no direct comparison has yet examined whether these modalities rely on similar neural mechanisms. In this study, we investigated whether spatialization in visual and auditory modalities involves shared or distinct patterns of activity within the working-memory network. Forty-nine participants performed both a visual and an auditory working memory SPoARC task of the same verbal material, allowing to study the cortical patterns associated with distinct serial positions at both encoding and recognition across sensory modalities. Whole-brain analyses revealed similar frontoparietal networks across conditions. In addition, a representational similarity analysis (RSA) was conducted to assess the similarity of neural patterns between early and late serial positions in a sequence and across sensory modalities. This multivoxel pattern analysis revealed modality-dependent patterns distinguishing early and late positions in the inferior frontal gyrus. Additional modality-specific effects were observed in the anterior intraparietal sulcus in the visual modality and in the posterior hippocampus in the auditory modality. Drawing on the framework proposed by Bottini & Doeller (2020), we propose that order decoding in the IPS might reflect a low-dimensional spatial coding of order (e.g., along a horizontal axis), whereas order decoding in the hippocampus might reflect higher-dimensional spatial representations or temporal representations.

A central question in psycholinguistics in visual word recognition is whether morphologically complex words are obligatorily decomposed into stems and affixes during visual word recognition or whether whole-word access can occur when forms are frequent and familiar. The present study investigated how morphological complexity and lexical frequency jointly shape neural responses by leveraging Korean nominal inflection, whose transparent stem-suffix structure permits a clean dissociation between base (stem) frequency and surface (whole-word) frequency. Twenty-five native Korean speakers completed a rapid event-related fMRI lexical decision task involving simple and inflected nouns that varied parametrically in both frequency measures. Representational similarity analysis (RSA) revealed robust encoding of surface frequency--but not base frequency--in the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) pars opercularis and supramarginal gyrus (SMG), with significantly stronger correlations for inflected than simple nouns. Univariate analyses converged with this result: surface frequency selectively increased activation for inflected nouns in inferior parietal regions, whereas base frequency showed no reliable effects in any ROI. These findings challenge models positing obligatory pre-lexical decomposition, instead supporting accounts in which morphological processing is shaped by post-lexical, usage-driven lexical statistics. Taken together, our findings shed light on a distributed perspective on morphological processing, suggesting that structural and statistical factors jointly constrain access to morphologically complex forms.

Visual spatial attention deployed in advance of sensory stimulation enhances the processing of the stimuli at an attended location. While it is understood that the attention control signals are established even before the stimulus occurs, how these signals help achieve stimulus selection is still not clear. Here, we investigated the neural mechanisms of spatial attention control and subsequent stimulus selection by recording fMRI data from participants performing a cued visual spatial attention task. At the beginning of each trial, participants were cued to covertly attend either the left or the right visual field. Following a random cue-target period, a target stimulus appeared either at the attended location or at the unattended location. Participants discriminated the stimulus appearing at the attended location and ignored the stimulus appearing at the unattended location. Using MVPA decoding and multivariate functional connectivity techniques, we investigated the nature of the information in visual cortex during both the cue and target periods, and further probed how cue-related information was related to target-related sensory processing. The following results were found: (1) attend-left vs. attend-right conditions could be decoded from the cue-period neural activity in visual cortex, (2) target position (target-left vs. target-right) could also be decoded from the target-evoked activity in visual cortex, (3) classifiers built on cue-period neural activity could cross-decode attended target-evoked neural activity in visual cortex and vice versa, (4) higher pattern similarity across cue and target periods, as indexed by cross-decoding accuracy, was correlated with better behavioral performance, (5) the strength of cue-evoked multivariate functional connectivity patterns in visual cortex was positively correlated with behavioral performance, and (6) cue-evoked multivariate functional connectivity patterns were similar to those evoked by the attended targets, and higher connectivity pattern similarity across cue and target periods was correlated with better behavioral performance. These results suggest that top-down attention control enables the formation of (1) a spatial attention template at the level of individual visual cortical areas and (2) an attention network template across visual areas, and these neural patterns support stimulus selection likely via a template matching mechanism at both area and pathway levels.

Neurons couple to various degrees to the activity level of the local neighboring population whereby strongly coupled choristers and weakly coupled soloists have been identified as two extremes of a continuous spectrum. At the same time neuronal populations undergo coordinated ON and OFF cortical state activity fluctuations, which are locally modulated by attention. The population coupling of soloists and choristers suggests that soloists should show limited alignment with cortical state fluctuations, while choristers should exhibit profound alignment. To test this, we recorded neurons across cortical layers in macaque areas V1 and V4, while animals performed a feature based spatial attention task. As expected, we found a wide range of population coupling strength of neurons. In line with our prediction, coupling of choristers to cortical state changes (ON-OFF transitions) was generally stronger than that of soloists. The strength of population coupling of neurons was similar during spontaneous and stimulus driven activity. Allocation of attention to the receptive field reduced the population coupling strength. Attentional modulation of neurons was positively correlated with population coupling strength. While neurons on average retained their coupling strengths across conditions, some neurons change coupling strength condition dependent, thereby potentially enhancing the coding abilities of cortical circuits.

3.The fusiform face area (FFA) preferentially responds to faces within the first months of life. One hypothesis is that higher-order social responses in middle medial prefrontal cortex (MMPFC) or face responses in superior temporal sulcus (STS) drive the development of face-selective responses in FFA, with right-hemisphere dominance in FFA eventually arising from lateralised connections to these regions. Another hypothesis proposes an innate face template in the amygdala guides attention to face-like shapes. This study opportunistically examined the development of the FFA, MMPFC, STS, and amygdala in childhood using an open cross-sectional movie-viewing fMRI dataset with 3-12-year-olds (N=117, M=6.77 years) and adults (N=33, M=24.77 years). We tested for correlations between FFA development and development in MMPFC, STS, and amygdala on the premise that associations between these regions may be observable even in children, and such associations could constrain hypotheses and analytic approaches in future studies with infants. First, we measured functional maturity-how similar each childs response to the movie was to an adult average response timecourse. In all regions, older childrens responses were more adult-like. Next, we tested whether FFA maturity correlated with functional connectivity with, or functional maturity of, MMPFC, STS, or amygdala. Children with more mature right FFA responses showed stronger right FFA-right MMPFC connectivity. Children with more mature FFA responses also had more mature STS responses, bilaterally. This study provides preliminary evidence that FFA co-develops with higher-order social brain regions and specific metrics to take forward in future research with infants. HighlightsO_LIWhat drives face selective responses in FFA is the subject of recent debate. C_LIO_LI117 children aged 3 to 12 years watched a short movie while undergoing fMRI. C_LIO_LIRight FFA development correlated with functional connectivity to right MMPFC C_LIO_LIFFA development correlated with STS development, bilaterally. C_LIO_LIFFA codevelops with higher-order social brain regions (controlling for age). C_LI

Loneliness, conceptualized as a multi-dimensional construct of unmet social needs, has been linked to adverse health outcomes across the lifespan, prompting significant interest in its underlying neural processes. Our study aimed to address the limitations of prior neuroimaging studies of loneliness by leveraging the Lifespan Human Connectome Project Aging dataset and applying graph theory to characterize its relationship with age and resting-state brain network organization. Socio-demographic measures confirmed prior work that higher loneliness was associated with younger age, being male, unmarried, and living alone. While loneliness showed no main effects on neural graph measures, a significant interaction between loneliness and age emerged for the local interconnectivity of the Default Model and Frontoparietal networks after adjusting for key socio-demographic factors. Conversely, older age was associated with lower functional connectivity, reduced global efficiency, and less modular brain network organization. Different graph measures showed distinct age-related associations, highlighting the heterogeneous nature of brain aging. The absence of a main effect of loneliness, while unexpected, underscores the complex, subjective nature of loneliness and suggests that its neural correlates may manifest differently across ages.

Play is a fundamental aspect of childhood and plays a crucial role in the development of creativity, yet its neural mechanisms remain poorly understood. We tested the hypothesis that more frequent play is associated with stronger functional integration among the default mode network (DMN), executive control network (CN), and salience network (SAL), as these cortical networks have been implicated in creativity in adults. In a preregistered study of infants and toddlers (Study 1; N = 143, 10 months-3 years, 67 boys, Baby Connectome Project), parent-reported play and imitation behaviors increased sharply from 1 to 2 years, and were associated with stronger within-DMN connectivity and DMN-CN coupling, controlling for age, sex, and head motion. In middle childhood (Study 2; N = 108, ages 4-11 years, 52 boys), parent-reported play frequency declined with age, as did cross-network coupling involving SAL. However, children who engaged more frequently in play showed higher DMN-SAL and CN-SAL connectivity. Finally, in a quasi-experimental comparison (Study 3; N = 45; ages 4-12 years, 20 boys), children enrolled in a curriculum that includes guided play (Montessori) showed higher DMN-SAL and DMN-CN connectivity than peers in traditional schools, suggesting that pedagogies that center child-led exploration might enable protracted brain network integration. Across these three studies, play was consistently associated with greater integration among DMN, SAL, and CN, a pattern previously linked to creativity in adults. Our findings offer a potential mechanism linking childhood play to later creativity through its role in supporting brain integration during development. Public Significant StatementO_LIPlay is widely believed to nurture childrens creativity, yet the brain mechanisms behind this link are not well understood. C_LIO_LIAcross three studies from infancy to middle childhood, we found that more frequent play was associated with stronger integration among brain networks tied to imagination, attention, and control. C_LIO_LIThese findings suggest that play may help build the neural foundation for later creative thinking. C_LI

Amygdala-related functional connectivity plays a crucial role in human emotion, cognition, and mental well-being. The amygdala is a highly heterogeneous structure, with subregions that have both distinct and overlapping functions. However, the connectivity patterns of different amygdala subregions--and how these associations vary with age--remain poorly understood. Functional MRI data were analyzed from 68 younger adults and 66 older adults during movie watching in a 7T MRI scanner. Partial least squares (PLS) analysis was used to identify latent variables capturing variance associated with age-related differences in the functional connectivity patterns of three amygdala subregions: the basolateral (BLA), centromedial (CMA), and superficial (SFA) nuclei. In addition, covariance between behavioral measures, such as emotional resilience and cognitive function, and functional connectivity of these subregions was examined. We further explored the associated cognitive processes, correspondence with large-scale brain networks, and the underlying chemoarchitecture of the identified connectivity patterns of the BLA, CMA, and SFA. Multivariate analyses revealed age-related and subregion-specific functional connectivity patterns. Functional connectivity patterns of amygdala subregions were further associated with emotional resilience, which largely overlapped across widespread brain regions; however, their associations differed by age. Stronger coupling of amygdala subregions predicted higher resilience in older adults but lower resilience in younger adults. The identified connectivity patterns were linked to the salience, control, and default mode networks and showed spatial correspondence with mGluR5 and 5-HT6 receptor distributions. These findings highlight age-dependent reorganization of amygdala-related networks that support emotional resilience and provide novel insights into how functional and neurochemical changes of the amygdala subregions contribute to adaptive emotional and cognitive functions in aging.

Despite numerous investigations, a comprehensive electrophysiological characterization of iconic memory remains lacking. Through a partial report paradigm, we aimed to shed light on this topic by disentangling electrophysiological activity related to stimulus perception from that linked with the specific task. We collected EEG data from 26 participants while they performed a partial report task. They were shown circular arrays of six letters lasting 100 ms. After the stimulus, an acoustic cue instructed the participant to report on which side of the array. Differences between reporting conditions were primarily evident in the time window 850-1100 ms, characterized by a positive component predominantly over parieto-occipital electrodes ipsilateral to the reporting side. Through linear regression, we also found a positive relationship between P1 and participants accuracy, as well as negative relationships between P3, VCR, TIF, and accuracy. Our results provide an overview of the different processes involved in iconic memory, corroborating the distinction between a series of neural mechanisms responsible for encoding and maintaining the entire stimulus and higher-order processes in charge of selecting an information subset for conscious report. The TIF component, in particular, could act as a key filtering mechanism to prevent irrelevant information from being selected for further processing. Our results provide, for the first time, a thorough characterization of the electrophysiological dynamics behind iconic memory. Moreover, implications for the consciousness debate are discussed, particularly regarding the overflow argument and how our results could be read through its lens.

Salient sensory stimuli are known to evoke neural activations across distributed brain regions. However, the temporal dynamics of these responses over sub-second timescales remain poorly understood, in part due to limitations in the temporal resolution of non-invasive neuroimaging methods. We examined the spatiotemporal dynamics of neural activations evoked by salient sensory stimuli (rare sounds) using 1,194 widely distributed intracranial electrodes in 5 neurosurgical patients. Salient stimuli preferentially activated 263 of 1,194 electrodes (22%), with responses segregating into two largely distinct spatiotemporal patterns: (1) phasic activation in sensorimotor regions, and (2) sustained activation within the salience network. Cross-correlation analysis revealed that phasic sensorimotor activation preceded sustained salience network activation on a trial-by-trial basis. These findings support an updated view of salience processing in the human brain, revealing that salient stimuli evoke two sequential stages of neural activation--phasic sensorimotor responses followed by sustained salience network activity--rather than simultaneous widespread activation.

A much-replicated finding in human brain imaging is a distributed "multiple-demand" or MD system, increasing in activity for many kinds of cognitive demand, and centrally involved in cognitive control. MD regions are proposed to encode a distributed mental model of critical task events, bound together in the roles and relationships needed to direct action selection. Though previous data hint at a corresponding network in the macaque, there has been no direct comparison to human data. Here we used functional magnetic resonance imaging to measure whole brain activation in a multi-step saccadic maze task, compared to a control requiring similar moves but without goal-based decisions. Human data were a close match to the canonical MD network, extended to include adjacent regions and in particular much of the canonical dorsal attention network. Monkey data suggested correspondences in dorsomedial frontal, lateral and medial parietal, insula/orbitofrontal and posterior temporal cortex. In lateral frontal cortex there was just a single, largely dorsal activation patch, in contrast to multiple distinct human patches. In macaque as in human, together with previous data, our findings suggest an extended and strongly interconnected brain network recruited by increased cognitive challenge.

Because early maths skills strongly predict later outcomes, it is crucial to understand the mechanisms that shape early learning in children. The recent years have seen an increase in studying the neural correlates that support the acquisition of maths skills. However, existing work in early childhood has primarily focused on core number-processing regions in the parietal regions, with comparatively little attention to the supportive role of prefrontal regions. In this study, we examined the engagement of the prefrontal regions when matching numbers and objects. Children (N=60, 25 girls, aged 2.74-5.18 years) matched auditory small (1-3) and large (5-7) numbers, as well as objects (fruits) to corresponding visual pictures while their frontoparietal brain responses were recorded using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS). Importantly, matching large numbers was substantially more difficult than matching small numbers or objects. The analysis revealed that children had increased activation in the right middle frontal gyrus when matching large numbers, compared to small numbers. However, there was no difference in the prefrontal region between matching small numbers and objects. The connectivity analysis further revealed increased frontoparietal connectivity when matching small numbers, but not large numbers or objects. Our findings suggest that prefrontal involvement during early numerical knowledge acquisition relies primarily on domain-general mechanisms, with number-specific responses likely to emerge later in development.

Language processing is supported by distributed neural systems. Yet most research examines these systems at the population-average level, obscuring how individual cognitive differences shape language-related brain activity. In this study, we combined comprehensive cognitive assessments and task-based fMRI in a large sample of healthy adults (N = 205) to examine how variability in linguistic knowledge, working memory, processing speed, and non-verbal reasoning influenced neural responses in four language tasks: lexical decision, picture naming, sentence comprehension, and sentence production. All tasks engaged canonical left-lateralized language regions. However, individual differences in cognitive skills were not associated with modulations within commonly activated regions, but rather with modulations in domain-general systems outside traditional perisylvian language areas, mainly the default mode and dorsal attention networks. Notably, activations in these domain-general regions were predominantly negatively correlated with cognitive skills, indicating that individuals with lower cognitive skills draw on these broader neural resources more than higher-skilled individuals, possibly as a compensatory mechanism. These results reveal that while canonical language regions are consistently engaged during language tasks, the recruitment of domain-general systems acts as a variable resource modulated by individuals cognitive skills. Overall, our findings demonstrate that individual cognitive profiles determine how distributed brain systems are dynamically engaged to scaffold language processing.

A well-known feature of cortical organization is the lateralization of the language network (LN) to the left hemisphere (LH). Although atypical LN lateralization to the right hemisphere (RH) is well documented, its consequences for other lateralized functions remain poorly understood. Face processing and other category-selective visual areas, which are typically RH-biased, provide key test cases for examining whether atypical LN lateralization is associated with reorganization in other networks. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data from the Human Connectome Project (HCP), we identified participants with right-hemisphere language dominance (RHLD) and examined whether category-selective visual areas exhibit reorganized hemispheric biases in these participants relative to those with typical left-hemisphere language dominance (LHLD). The results demonstrated selective reorganization within the face-selective areas: some regions showed a leftward shift in hemispheric bias in RHLD participants, whereas others preserved the canonical RH preference. This pattern indicates that cortical reorganization associated with atypical LN lateralization is region-specific rather than global, consistent with a flexible neural architecture in which hemispheric specialization can be selectively reconfigured. These results clarify how atypical LN lateralization impacts the hemispheric organization of face-selective areas and provide evidence for altered network-level specialization in the cerebral cortex.