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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...

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Autores principales: Wimmer, Heinz, Ludersdorfer, Philipp, Richlan, Fabio, Kronbichler, Martin
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: SAGE Publications 2016
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.
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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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