ISSN 1671-3710
CN 11-4766/R
主办:中国科学院心理研究所
出版:科学出版社

›› 2011, Vol. 19 ›› Issue (2): 159-165.

• 研究简报 • Previous Articles     Next Articles

The Study of Neural Mechanism of Top-down Letter Processing Based on fMRI

LIU Jian-Gang;TIAN Jie;Kang LEE   

  1. (1 School of Computer and Information Technology, Beijing Jiaotong University, Beijing 100044, China)
    (2 Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100190, China)
    (3 University of Toronto, Canada)
  • Received:2011-01-04 Revised:1900-01-01 Online:2011-02-15 Published:2011-02-15
  • Contact: LIU Jian-Gang

Abstract: People can efficiently recognize an object even under some extremely poor viewing conditions. Such efficient visual processing depends on both bottom-up input and top-down regulations. The present study used a novel illusory detection paradigm to investigate the neural network involved in top-down letter processing. This paradigm required participants to detect letters in pure noise images that actually contained no letters. By using of psychophysiological interaction (PPI) analysis, it revealed that some regions’ responses were influenced by the enhanced connectivity from the right fusiform. These findings suggested that the top-down letter processing network not only contains the regions that process the visual appearance of letters and their phonological information, but also involves neural regions involved in such high-level cognitive processes as memory retrieval and attention.

Key words: letter processing, top-down, fMRI, psychophysiological interaction