Both mOTS-words and pOTS-words prefer emoji stimuli over text stimuli during a lexical judgment task.
Cereb Cortex
; 34(8)2024 Aug 01.
Article
in En
| MEDLINE
| ID: mdl-39191663
ABSTRACT
The visual word form area in the occipitotemporal sulcus (here OTS-words) is crucial for reading and shows a preference for text stimuli. We hypothesized that this text preference may be driven by lexical processing. Hence, we performed three fMRI experiments (n = 15), systematically varying participants' task and stimulus, and separately evaluated middle mOTS-words and posterior pOTS-words. Experiment 1 contrasted text with other visual stimuli to identify both OTS-words subregions. Experiment 2 utilized an fMRI adaptation paradigm, presenting compound words as texts or emojis. In experiment 3, participants performed a lexical or color judgment task on compound words in text or emoji format. In experiment 2, pOTS-words, but not mOTS-words, showed fMRI adaptation for compound words in both formats. In experiment 3, both subregions showed higher responses to compound words in emoji format. Moreover, mOTS-words showed higher responses during the lexical judgment task and a task-stimulus interaction. Multivariate analyses revealed that distributed responses in pOTS-words encode stimulus and distributed responses in mOTS-words encode stimulus and task. Together, our findings suggest that the function of the OTS-words subregions goes beyond the specific visual processing of text and that these regions are flexibly recruited whenever semantic meaning needs to be assigned to visual input.
Key words
Full text:
1
Collection:
01-internacional
Database:
MEDLINE
Main subject:
Reading
/
Magnetic Resonance Imaging
/
Judgment
Limits:
Adult
/
Female
/
Humans
/
Male
Language:
En
Journal:
Cereb Cortex
Journal subject:
CEREBRO
Year:
2024
Document type:
Article
Affiliation country:
Germany
Country of publication:
United States