Abstract

Access to semantic information of visual word forms is a key component of reading comprehension. In this study, we examined the involvement of the visual word form area (VWFA) in this process by investigating whether and how the activity patterns of the VWFA are influenced by semantic information during semantic tasks. We asked participants to perform two semantic tasks - taxonomic or thematic categorization - on visual words while obtaining the blood-oxygen-level-dependent (BOLD) fMRI responses to each word. Representational similarity analysis with four types of semantic relations (taxonomic, thematic, subjective semantic rating and word2vec) revealed that neural activity patterns of the VWFA were associated with taxonomic information only in the taxonomic task, with thematic information only in the thematic task and with the composite semantic information measured by word2vec in both semantic tasks. Furthermore, the semantic information in the VWFA cannot be explained by confounding factors including orthographic, low-level visual and phonological information. These findings provide positive evidence for the presence of both orthographic and task-relevant semantic information in the VWFA and have significant implications for the neurobiological basis of reading.

Details

Title
Representational similarity analysis reveals task-dependent semantic influence of the visual word form area
Author
Wang, Xiaosha 1 ; Xu, Yangwen 2 ; Wang, Yuwei 3 ; Zeng, Yi 3 ; Zhang, Jiacai 4 ; Ling, Zhenhua 5 ; Bi, Yanchao 2 

 College of Information Science and Technology, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China; National Key Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning & IDG/McGovern Institute for Brain Research, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China; Beijing Key Laboratory of Brain Imaging and Connectomics, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China 
 National Key Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning & IDG/McGovern Institute for Brain Research, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China; Beijing Key Laboratory of Brain Imaging and Connectomics, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China 
 Research Center for Brain-inspired Intelligence & National Laboratory of Pattern Recognition, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China; Center for Excellence in Brain Science and Intelligence Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai, China 
 College of Information Science and Technology, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China 
 National Engineering Laboratory for Speech and Language Information Processing, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, China 
Pages
1-10
Publication year
2018
Publication date
Feb 2018
Publisher
Nature Publishing Group
e-ISSN
20452322
Source type
Scholarly Journal
Language of publication
English
ProQuest document ID
2002201419
Copyright
© 2018. This work is published under http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (the “License”). Notwithstanding the ProQuest Terms and Conditions, you may use this content in accordance with the terms of the License.