Mechanisms underlying category learning in the human ventral occipito-temporal cortex.
Neuroimage
; 287: 120520, 2024 Feb 15.
Article
in En
| MEDLINE
| ID: mdl-38242489
ABSTRACT
The human ventral occipito-temporal cortex (VOTC) has evolved into specialized regions that process specific categories, such as words, tools, and animals. The formation of these areas is driven by bottom-up visual and top-down nonvisual experiences. However, the specific mechanisms through which top-down nonvisual experiences modulate category-specific regions in the VOTC are still unknown. To address this question, we conducted a study in which participants were trained for approximately 13 h to associate three sets of novel meaningless figures with different top-down nonvisual features the wordlike category with word features, the non-wordlike category with nonword features, and the visual familiarity condition with no nonvisual features. Pre- and post-training functional MRI (fMRI) experiments were used to measure brain activity during stimulus presentation. Our results revealed that training induced a categorical preference for the two training categories within the VOTC. Moreover, the locations of two training category-specific regions exhibited a notable overlap. Remarkably, within the overlapping category-specific region, training resulted in a dissociation in activation intensity and pattern between the two training categories. These findings provide important insights into how different nonvisual categorical information is encoded in the human VOTC.
Key words
Full text:
1
Collection:
01-internacional
Database:
MEDLINE
Main subject:
Temporal Lobe
/
Learning
Type of study:
Prognostic_studies
Limits:
Humans
Language:
En
Journal:
Neuroimage
Journal subject:
DIAGNOSTICO POR IMAGEM
Year:
2024
Document type:
Article
Country of publication:
Estados Unidos