Evidence for Highly Selective Neuronal Tuning to Whole Words in the “Visual Word Form Area”

Glezer, Laurie S.; Jiang, Xiong; Riesenhuber, Maximilian

doi:10.1016/j.neuron.2009.03.017

Cited by 252 publications

(329 citation statements)

References 29 publications

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“…Due to recent evidence emphasizing the strong inter-subject variability in the location of the left vOT (Glezer et al 2009(Glezer et al , 2013), here we used three different criteria to identify this region: 1) litROI; 2) gROIs, identifying the a) highest T value within the FG and the b) highest T value within the FG closest to Cohen's VWFA definition ; and, 3) iROIs, following the same approach described for the gROIs but identifying each of the local maxima to build the ROIs at the individual level and extracting the parameter estimates for each region at the single subject level (see Methods section for further details).…”

Section: Ventral Regions Left Pars Triangularis Roi Results For Thismentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Based on previous neuroimaging evidence, we functionally Given recent evidence emphasizing the strong inter-subject variability in the location of the left vOT region involved in reading (Glezer et al 2009(Glezer et al , 2013Vogel et al 2012), in the present study we identified the left vOT following three different criteria: 1) literature ROI (litROI) or ROI identified based on a prior meta-analysis of reading studies (Jobard et al 2003), building a 5-mm radius ROI sphere centered at -44 -58 -15 MNI coordinates; 2) based on the group activation (gROIs), performing a whole-brain analysis across all participants for the contrast Words > Null (q < .01 FDR; masked with Words > Consonant Strings, p < .05 uncorrected) and identifying a) the highest T value within the fusiform gyrus (FG) and b) the highest T value within the FG closest to Cohen's VWFA definition (x = -43, y = -54, z = -12; Cohen et al 2002) to build 5-mm radius sphere ROIs centered at those values; and 3) based on individual ROIs (iROIs), following the same approach described for the gROIs but identifying each of the local maximas to build the 5-mm radius sphere ROIs for each criteria at the individual level and extracting the parameter estimates for each region at the single-subject level.…”

Section: Fmri Data Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

“…To our knowledge, this is the first study to examine in bilinguals whether the activation profile of the vOT differs as a function of perceptual versus semantic reading tasks using a within-subject manipulation. Moreover, based on recent evidence (Glezer et al 2009;, here we sought to examine the regional activation of the vOT attending to different criteria to identify the area: coordinates from a prior meta-analysis and activation at the group and individual subject levels. It has been suggested that there is a strong inter-subject variability in the location of this region, probably due to its rapid re-adaptation to support a phylogenetically new skill (Dehaene and Cohen 2007;Bouhali et al 2014).…”

Section: Semantic Reading Demands Elicit Stronger Left Vot Engagementmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Functional Dynamics of Dorsal and Ventral Reading Networks in Bilinguals

2016

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Section: Ventral Regions Left Pars Triangularis Roi Results For Thismentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Fmri Data Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Semantic Reading Demands Elicit Stronger Left Vot Engagementmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Functional Dynamics of Dorsal and Ventral Reading Networks in Bilinguals

2016

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“…As the tuning of higher-order combinationsensitive units is contingent upon sensory experience (124,125), phrases and sentences would not generally be processed as Gestalt-like objects. Although we have analyzed studies involving phrase-and sentence-level processing, their inclusion is for context and because word-form recognition is a constituent part of sentence processing.…”

Section: And Cohen and Colleagues' (2004) Hypothesis Of An Auditory Wmentioning

confidence: 99%

Phoneme and word recognition in the auditory ventral stream

DeWitt

Rauschecker²

2012

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

401

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Spoken word recognition requires complex, invariant representations. Using a meta-analytic approach incorporating more than 100 functional imaging experiments, we show that preference for complex sounds emerges in the human auditory ventral stream in a hierarchical fashion, consistent with nonhuman primate electrophysiology. Examining speech sounds, we show that activation associated with the processing of short-timescale patterns (i.e., phonemes) is consistently localized to left mid-superior temporal gyrus (STG), whereas activation associated with the integration of phonemes into temporally complex patterns (i.e., words) is consistently localized to left anterior STG. Further, we show left midto anterior STG is reliably implicated in the invariant representation of phonetic forms and that this area also responds preferentially to phonetic sounds, above artificial control sounds or environmental sounds. Together, this shows increasing encoding specificity and invariance along the auditory ventral stream for temporally complex speech sounds.functional MRI | meta-analysis | auditory cortex | object recognition | language S poken word recognition presents several challenges to the brain. Two key challenges are the assembly of complex auditory representations and the variability of natural speech (SI Appendix, Fig. S1) (1). Representation at the level of primary auditory cortex is precise: fine-grained in scale and local in spectrotemporal space (2, 3). The recognition of complex spectrotemporal forms, like words, in higher areas of auditory cortex requires the transformation of this granular representation into Gestalt-like, object-centered representations. In brief, local features must be bound together to form representations of complex spectrotemporal contours, which are themselves the constituents of auditory "objects" or complex sound patterns (4, 5). Next, representations must be generalized and abstracted. Coding in primary auditory cortex is sensitive even to minor physical transformations. Object-centered coding in higher areas, however, must be invariant (i.e., tolerant of natural stimulus variation) (6). For example, whereas the phonemic structure of a word is fixed, there is considerable variation in physical, spectrotemporal form-attributable to accent, pronunciation, body size, and the like-among utterances of a given word. It has been proposed for visual cortical processing that a feed-forward, hierarchical architecture (7) may be capable of simultaneously solving the problems of complexity and variability (8-12). Here, we examine these ideas in the context of auditory cortex.In a hierarchical pattern-recognition scheme (8), coding in the earliest cortical field would reflect the tuning and organization of primary auditory cortex (or core) (2, 3, 13). That is, single-neuron receptive fields (more precisely, frequency-response areas) would be tuned to particular center frequencies and would have minimal spectrotemporal complexity (i.e., a single excitatory zone and one-to-two inhibitory side bands). ...

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“…This region, called the visual word form area (VWFA) (Cohen et al, 2000(Cohen et al, , 2002McCandliss et al, 2003), is shaped by reading experiences (Hashimoto and Sakai, 2004;Baker et al, 2007;Brem et al, 2010;Dehaene et al, 2010) and is not sensitive to low-level features of written words, such as size, position, font, or letter case (Dehaene et al, 2004;Binder et al, 2006;Vinckier et al, 2007;Glezer et al, 2009;Qiao et al, 2010;Braet et al, 2012). Neuropsychological studies have further revealed that the VWFA is necessary for reading, as the lesion of the VWFA is related to pure alexia with the hallmark feature of word-length effect (Mani et al, 2008;Pflugshaupt et al, 2009;Starrfelt et al, 2009).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Top-Down Processing of Symbolic Meanings Modulates the Visual Word Form Area

2012

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Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies on humans have identified a region in the left middle fusiform gyrus consistently activated by written words. This region is called the visual word form area (VWFA). Recently, a hypothesis, called the interactive account, is proposed that to effectively analyze the bottom-up visual properties of words, the VWFA receives predictive feedback from higherorder regions engaged in processing sounds, meanings, or actions associated with words. Further, this top-down influence on the VWFA is independent of stimulus formats. To test this hypothesis, we used fMRI to examine whether a symbolic nonword object (e.g., the Eiffel Tower) intended to represent something other than itself (i.e., Paris) could activate the VWFA. We found that scenes associated with symbolic meanings elicited a higher VWFA response than those not associated with symbolic meanings, and such top-down modulation on the VWFA can be established through short-term associative learning, even across modalities. In addition, the magnitude of the symbolic effect observed in the VWFA was positively correlated with the subjective experience on the strength of symbol-referent association across individuals. Therefore, the VWFA is likely a neural substrate for the interaction of the top-down processing of symbolic meanings with the analysis of bottom-up visual properties of sensory inputs, making the VWFA the location where the symbolic meaning of both words and nonword objects is represented.

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Evidence for Highly Selective Neuronal Tuning to Whole Words in the “Visual Word Form Area”

Cited by 252 publications

References 29 publications

Functional Dynamics of Dorsal and Ventral Reading Networks in Bilinguals

Functional Dynamics of Dorsal and Ventral Reading Networks in Bilinguals

Phoneme and word recognition in the auditory ventral stream

Top-Down Processing of Symbolic Meanings Modulates the Visual Word Form Area

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