Word contexts enhance the neural representation of individual letters in early visual cortex.,Nature Communications

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Word contexts enhance the neural representation of individual letters in early visual cortex.
Nature Communications ( IF 14.7 ) Pub Date : 2020-01-16 , DOI: 10.1038/s41467-019-13996-4
Micha Heilbron _{1,

2} , David Richter ₁ , Matthias Ekman ₁ , Peter Hagoort _{1,

2} , Floris P de Lange ₁

Affiliation

Visual context facilitates perception, but how this is neurally implemented remains unclear. One example of contextual facilitation is found in reading, where letters are more easily identified when embedded in a word. Bottom-up models explain this word advantage as a post-perceptual decision bias, while top-down models propose that word contexts enhance perception itself. Here, we arbitrate between these accounts by presenting words and nonwords and probing the representational fidelity of individual letters using functional magnetic resonance imaging. In line with top-down models, we find that word contexts enhance letter representations in early visual cortex. Moreover, we observe increased coupling between letter information in visual cortex and brain activity in key areas of the reading network, suggesting these areas may be the source of the enhancement. Our results provide evidence for top-down representational enhancement in word recognition, demonstrating that word contexts can modulate perceptual processing already at the earliest visual regions.

中文翻译：

单词上下文增强了早期视觉皮层中单个字母的神经表征。

视觉环境有助于感知，但其如何在神经上实现仍不清楚。上下文促进的一个例子是阅读，当字母嵌入单词中时，更容易识别。自下而上的模型将这个单词优势解释为感知后决策偏差，而自上而下的模型则认为单词上下文增强了感知本身。在这里，我们通过呈现单词和非单词并使用功能磁共振成像探测单个字母的表征保真度来在这些帐户之间进行仲裁。根据自上而下的模型，我们发现单词上下文增强了早期视觉皮层的字母表征。此外，我们观察到视觉皮层中的字母信息与阅读网络关键区域的大脑活动之间的耦合增加，这表明这些区域可能是增强的来源。我们的结果为单词识别中自上而下的表征增强提供了证据，证明单词上下文可以在最早的视觉区域调节感知处理。

更新日期：2020-01-16

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