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The mechanism by which the word or tool category of a novel figure is learned in the human ventral occipito-temporal cortex
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Poster A99 in Poster Session A, Tuesday, October 24, 10:15 am - 12:00 pm CEST, Espace Vieux-Port
This poster is part of the Sandbox Series.
Xiangqi Luo1, Mingyang Li2, Jiahong Zeng1, Zaizhu Han1; 1Beijing Normal University, 2Zhejiang University
Rapid and precise categorization of visual stimuli is usually crucial for the survival and reproduction of higher-order animals. The human ventral occipital-temporal cortex (VOTC) has evolved some regions that specifically process these different categories (e.g., tools, animals, faces, and words). Studies have shown that the visual features of visual stimuli play an important role in determining these category-specific regions in the VOTC. However, the role of nonvisual features of the stimuli in forming these categorical regions remains unknown. To address this issue, we engaged 19 healthy subjects in approximately 13 training sessions to learn associations between three homogeneous sets of novel meaningless figures and different high-level features: nonvisual features (pronunciation, grammatical class) for the word category (i.e., word condition), nonvisual features (manipulation, function) for the tool category (i.e., tool condition), and no features in a third category (i.e., baseline condition). The subjects additionally completed pre- and post-training functional MRI (fMRI) experiments for all the stimuli. Training in the two categorical conditions induced higher activity in the VOTC compared to the baseline condition. Moreover, the training between the two categories elicited different intensities and patterns of activity in the categorical preference region of the VOTC but these regions were in the same location. The training also yielded the categorical dissociation of the functional coupling strengths between the within-category-specific areas, reflecting an interactive mechanism between the VOTC and the high-level regions. These findings offer pivotal evidence elucidating how abstract information of objects is encoded into neural representations in the human VOTC.
Topic Areas: Language Development/Acquisition,