Effects of Literacy in Early Visual and Occipitotemporal Areas of Chinese and French Readers

Szwed, Marcin; Qiao, Emilie; Jobert, Antoinette; Dehaene, Stanislas; Cohen, Laurent

doi:10.1162/jocn_a_00499

Cited by 91 publications

(82 citation statements)

References 62 publications

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“…These differences in hemispheric distribution may simply be because of chance, but they do align with the well-known dominance of the left-hemisphere for language. They also align with recent reports that activation in left-hemisphere visual cortex as measured with fMRI reflects word recognition (Szwed et al, 2011(Szwed et al, , 2014. It is tempting to speculate that left hemisphere visual encoding during text-reading is particularly important for enabling the lexical processes that drive the eyes forward through text as proposed by E-Z Reader.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 87%

“…This result is consistent with the finding that individual differences in fixation duration in reading are correlated with individual differences in fixation duration in other tasks including visual search and picture memorization (Henderson & Luke, in press). At the same time, however, the observed associations here tended to be stronger in left hemisphere for text and bilaterally distributed for pseudotext, suggesting the possibility of some reading specialization in left-hemisphere visual cortex based on literacy (Szwed, Qiao, Jobert, Dehaene, & Cohen, 2014). Overall, we conclude that fixation durations are influenced by early visual encoding, consistent with E-Z Reader.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 70%

“…We note that the cortical structure investigated in this study is not typically thought to be directly tied to lexical analysis (Szwed et al, 2011(Szwed et al, , 2014. Instead, this study was predicated on the assumption that lexical analysis supporting the L1 and L2 stages of lexical analysis in E-Z Reader Correlations between morphology of pericalcarine cortex and ex-Gaussian distribution parameters for fixation duration during text-reading by participant.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 88%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Morphology of Primary Visual Cortex Predicts Individual Differences in Fixation Duration during Text Reading

Henderson

Choi

Luke

2014

Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience

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In skilled reading, fixations are brief periods of time in which the eyes settle on words. E-Z Reader, a computational model of dynamic reading, posits that fixation durations are under real-time control of lexical processing. Lexical processing, in turn, requires efficient visual encoding. Here we tested the hypothesis that individual differences in fixation durations are related to individual differences in the efficiency of early visual encoding. To test this hypothesis, we recorded participants' eye movements during reading. We then examined individual differences in fixation duration distributions as a function of individual differences in the morphology of primary visual cortex measured from MRI scans. The results showed that greater gray matter surface area and volume in visual cortex predicted shorter and less variable fixation durations in reading. These results suggest that individual differences in eye movements during skilled reading are related to initial visual encoding, consistent with models such as E-Z Reader that emphasize lexical control over fixation time.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 87%

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 70%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 88%

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Morphology of Primary Visual Cortex Predicts Individual Differences in Fixation Duration during Text Reading

Henderson

Choi

Luke

2014

Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience

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“…In humans, there is also evidence for segregated activations for letters and numerals in the fusiform gyrus (Polk et al, 2002;Shum et al, 2013;Abboud et al, 2015), and for Chinese vs alphabetic stimuli in the early visual cortex (Szwed et al, 2014). There are also some indications of segregated activations for printed words and musical notation in the occipitotemporal cortex (Wong and Gauthier, 2010a), but this evidence is controversial (Muayqil et al, 2015) and is not supported by statistical comparisons of activation topography between words and music.…”

Section: Accepted Manuscriptmentioning

confidence: 99%

Music and words in the visual cortex: The impact of musical expertise

Mongelli

Dehaene

Vinckier

et al. 2017

Cortex

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How does the human visual system accommodate expertise for two simultaneously acquired symbolic systems? We used fMRI to compare activations induced in the visual cortex by musical notation, written words and other classes of objects, in professional musicians and in musically naïve controls. First, irrespective of expertise, selective activations for music were posterior and lateral to activations for words in the left occipitotemporal cortex. This indicates that symbols characterized by different visual features engage distinct cortical areas. Second, musical expertise increased the volume of activations for music and led to an anterolateral displacement of word-related activations. In musicians, there was also a dramatic increase of the brain-scale networks connected to the music-selective visual areas. Those findings reveal that acquiring a double visual expertise involves an expansion of category-selective areas, the development of novel longdistance functional connectivity, and possibly some competition between categories for the colonization of cortical space.

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“…Szwed et al (2014) reported higher mean BOLD activity in left-lateralized BA 17–19 when Chinese and French participants read letter-scrambled words in their own native script. Gutchess et al (2006) found dissimilar mean BOLD responses to focal objects vs contextual backgrounds between East Asian and American participants in left-lateralized BA 18 and 19 as well.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 91%

Cultural specialization of visual cortex

Ksander

Paige

Johndro

et al. 2018

Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience

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A growing body of evidence suggests culture influences how individuals perceive the world around them. This study investigates whether these cultural differences extend to a simple object viewing task and visual cortex by examining voxel pattern representations with multi-voxel pattern analysis (MVPA). During functional magnetic resonance imaging scanning, 20 East Asian and 20 American participants viewed photos of everyday items, equated for familiarity and conceptual agreement across cultures. Whole brain searchlight mapping with non-parametric statistical evaluation tested whether these stimuli evoked multi-voxel patterns that were distinct between cultural groups. We found that participants’ cultural identities were successfully predicted from stimuli representations in visual cortex Brodmann areas 18 and 19. This result demonstrates culturally specialized visual cortex during a basic perceptual task ubiquitous to everyday life.

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Effects of Literacy in Early Visual and Occipitotemporal Areas of Chinese and French Readers

Abstract: Abstract■ How does reading expertise change the visual system? Here,

Cited by 91 publications

References 62 publications

Morphology of Primary Visual Cortex Predicts Individual Differences in Fixation Duration during Text Reading

Morphology of Primary Visual Cortex Predicts Individual Differences in Fixation Duration during Text Reading

Music and words in the visual cortex: The impact of musical expertise

Cultural specialization of visual cortex

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