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      Word Contexts Enhance The Neural Representation of Individual Letters in Early Visual Cortex

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      Creators
      Heilbron, M.
      Richter, D.
      Ekman, M.
      Hagoort, P.
      Lange, F.P. de
      Date of Archiving
      2019
      Archive
      Radboud Data Repository
      Data archive handle
      https://hdl.handle.net/11633/aacjymw7
      Related publications
      Word contexts enhance the neural representation of individual letters in early visual cortex  
      Publication type
      Dataset
      Access level
      Restricted access
      Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/2066/209330   https://hdl.handle.net/2066/209330
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      Organization
      PI Group Predictive Brain
      SW OZ DCC PL
      PI Group Neurobiology of Language
      SW OZ DCC CO
      Audience(s)
      Life sciences
      Languages used
      English
      Key words
      reading; cortical feedback; language; vision
      Abstract
      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.
      This item appears in the following Collection(s)
      • Datasets [1399]
      • Donders Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging [3568]
      • Faculty of Social Sciences [28470]
       
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