Top row: Two major kinds of childhood blindness in India.

<p>The left panel shows cataracts, and the right shows corneal opacities. Many cases of pediatric cataracts are congenital. The lower row shows, from left to right, cataract surgery in progress, a dilated pupil revealing a dense cataract, and the eye after excision of the cataract and implantation of an intra-ocular lens.</p

Stimuli for the Visual Word Form Area (VWFA) Localizer.

<p>Localizer stimuli consisted of four categories: objects, faces, words, and squiggles. Images were redrawn as dots to control for contour structure and spatial frequency.</p

Reversed Letters > Typical Letters.

<p>Activation from the whole-brain analysis for the reversed letters > typical letters contrast. Direct comparison of children and adults showed that adults exhibited significantly greater activation for the reversed > typical letters contrast than children did in multiple regions, including the left ventral visual stream and bilateral parietal cortices.</p

Whole Brain Activation.

<p>Whole Brain Activation.</p

Behavioral Scores for Participants in fMRI Experiment.

<p>This table is reporting standard scores, except of the CTOPP where we report scaled scores, therefore they do not have the typical mean of 100 like standard scores, instead they have mean of 10 and a standard deviation of 3. KBIT  =  Kaufman Brief Intelligence Test; WRMT  =  Woodcock Reading Mastery Tests, CTOPP  =  Comprehensive Test of Phonological Processing; SWE  =  Sight Word Extraction; PDE  =  Phonemic Decoding Efficiency; ns  =  not significant. P values indicate significance level of t-test between the two groups on the measure.</p

Letter reversal task.

<p>Participants were presented with a stimulus (letter, reversed letter, or chair) for 200 ms followed by 800 ms of a blank screen. Stimuli were presented in a block design in the fMRI portion, and an event related design in the ERP portion of the experiment.</p

Letter Reversal In-Scanner and ERP Behavioral Data.

<p>Values listed are means, with standard deviation in parentheses.</p

ERP Results.

<p>ERP Waveforms and Voltage Maps. Grand average waveforms for the adults (A) and for the Children (D) showing the P1 and N170 differences present in adults, but not children. The distribution of these effects is depicted in voltage maps (B and E) showing the difference between normally-oriented letters and mirror-reversed letters (reversed – normal). Black dots on the voltage maps indicate electrode sites included in the mean amplitude analysis. Note the scale difference between the P1 and N170 epoch. C shows the peak latency difference between reversed and normally-orientated letters in adults where the latency is increased for mirror reversed letters. In F, children show a delayed peak latency that does not differ between the two conditions.</p

Localizer Accuracy and Reaction Time.

<p>Values listed are means, with standard deviation in parentheses.</p

VWFA Region of Interest Analysis.

<p>Average beta values for independently defined VWFA region of interest. Adults had greater activation for reversed letters than letters, while children showed no difference. There was a significant interaction between group and letter type.</p