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Visual Experience Shapes Orthographic Representations in the Visual Word Form Area
Current neurocognitive research suggests that the efficiency of visual word recognition rests on abstract memory representations of written letters and words stored in the visual word form area (VWFA) in the left ventral occipitotemporal cortex. These representations are assumed to be invariant to v...
Autores principales: | , , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
SAGE Publications
2016
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5017316/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27435995 http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0956797616657319 |
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author | Wimmer, Heinz Ludersdorfer, Philipp Richlan, Fabio Kronbichler, Martin |
author_facet | Wimmer, Heinz Ludersdorfer, Philipp Richlan, Fabio Kronbichler, Martin |
author_sort | Wimmer, Heinz |
collection | PubMed |
description | Current neurocognitive research suggests that the efficiency of visual word recognition rests on abstract memory representations of written letters and words stored in the visual word form area (VWFA) in the left ventral occipitotemporal cortex. These representations are assumed to be invariant to visual characteristics such as font and case. In the present functional MRI study, we tested this assumption by presenting written words and varying the case format of the initial letter of German nouns (which are always capitalized) as well as German adjectives and adverbs (both usually in lowercase). As evident from a Word Type × Case Format interaction, activation in the VWFA was greater to words presented in unfamiliar case formats relative to familiar case formats. Our results suggest that neural representations of written words in the VWFA are not fully abstract and still contain information about the visual format in which words are most frequently perceived. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-5017316 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2016 |
publisher | SAGE Publications |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-50173162016-09-12 Visual Experience Shapes Orthographic Representations in the Visual Word Form Area Wimmer, Heinz Ludersdorfer, Philipp Richlan, Fabio Kronbichler, Martin Psychol Sci Research Articles Current neurocognitive research suggests that the efficiency of visual word recognition rests on abstract memory representations of written letters and words stored in the visual word form area (VWFA) in the left ventral occipitotemporal cortex. These representations are assumed to be invariant to visual characteristics such as font and case. In the present functional MRI study, we tested this assumption by presenting written words and varying the case format of the initial letter of German nouns (which are always capitalized) as well as German adjectives and adverbs (both usually in lowercase). As evident from a Word Type × Case Format interaction, activation in the VWFA was greater to words presented in unfamiliar case formats relative to familiar case formats. Our results suggest that neural representations of written words in the VWFA are not fully abstract and still contain information about the visual format in which words are most frequently perceived. SAGE Publications 2016-07-20 2016-09 /pmc/articles/PMC5017316/ /pubmed/27435995 http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0956797616657319 Text en © The Author(s) 2016 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access page (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage). |
spellingShingle | Research Articles Wimmer, Heinz Ludersdorfer, Philipp Richlan, Fabio Kronbichler, Martin Visual Experience Shapes Orthographic Representations in the Visual Word Form Area |
title | Visual Experience Shapes Orthographic Representations in the Visual Word Form
Area |
title_full | Visual Experience Shapes Orthographic Representations in the Visual Word Form
Area |
title_fullStr | Visual Experience Shapes Orthographic Representations in the Visual Word Form
Area |
title_full_unstemmed | Visual Experience Shapes Orthographic Representations in the Visual Word Form
Area |
title_short | Visual Experience Shapes Orthographic Representations in the Visual Word Form
Area |
title_sort | visual experience shapes orthographic representations in the visual word form
area |
topic | Research Articles |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5017316/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27435995 http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0956797616657319 |
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