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Denis Le Bihan
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Journal Articles
Publisher: Journals Gateway
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience (2005) 17 (6): 954–968.
Published: 01 June 2005
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Recent evidence has suggested that the human occipito-temporal region comprises several subregions, each sensitive to a distinct processing level of visual words. To further explore the functional architecture of visual word recognition, we employed a subliminal priming method with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) during semantic judgments of words presented in two different Japanese scripts, Kanji and Kana. Each target word was preceded by a subliminal presentation of either the same or a different word, and in the same or a different script. Behaviorally, word repetition produced significant priming regardless of whether the words were presented in the same or different script. At the neural level, this cross-script priming was associated with repetition suppression in the left inferior temporal cortex anterior and dorsal to the visual word form area hypothesized for alphabetical writing systems, suggesting that cross-script convergence occurred at a semantic level. fMRI also evidenced a shared visual occipito-temporal activation for words in the two scripts, with slightly more mesial and right-predominant activation for Kanji and with greater occipital activation for Kana. These results thus allow us to separate script-specific and script-independent regions in the posterior temporal lobe, while demonstrating that both can be activated subliminally.
Journal Articles
Publisher: Journals Gateway
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience (2000) 12 (Supplement 2): 15–23.
Published: 01 November 2000
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Although it is largely accepted that visual-mental imagery and perception draw on many of the same neural structures, the existence and nature of neural processing in the primary visual cortex (or area V1) during visual imagery remains controversial. We tested two general hypotheses: The first was that V1 is activated only when images with many details are formed and used, and the second was that V1 is activated whenever images are formed, even if they are not necessarily used to perform a task. We used event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (ER-fMRI) to detect and characterize the activity in the calcarine sulcus (which contains the primary visual cortex) during single instances of mental imagery. The results revealed reproducible transient activity in this area whenever participants generated or evaluated a mental image. This transient activity was strongly enhanced when participants evaluated characteristics of objects, whether or not details actually needed to be extracted from the image to perform the task. These results show that visual imagery processing commonly involves the earliest stages of the visual system.