Life Sciences Research Center, School of Life Sciences and Technology, Xidian University, Xi'an 710071, China.
Neurosci Lett. 2010 Jul 5;478(2):107-11. doi: 10.1016/j.neulet.2010.04.075. Epub 2010 May 7.
Chinese people engage long-term processing of characters. It has been demonstrated that the presented orientation affects the perception of several types of stimuli when people have possessed expertise with them, e.g. face, body, and scene. However, the influence of inversion on the neural mechanism of Chinese character processing has not been sufficiently discussed. In the present study, a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) experiment is performed to examine the effect of inversion on Chinese character processing, which employs Chinese character, face and house as stimuli. The region of interest analysis demonstrates inversion leads to neural response increases for Chinese character in left fusiform character-preferential area, bilateral fusiform object-preferential area and bilateral occipital object-preferential area, and such inversion-caused changes in the response pattern of characters processing are highly similar to those of faces processing but quiet different from those of houses processing. Whole brain analysis reveals the upright characters recruit several language regions for phonology and semantic processing, however, the inverted characters activated extensive regions related to the visual information processing. Our findings reveal a shift from the character-preferential processing route to the generic object processing steam within visual cortex when the characters are inverted, and suggest that different mechanisms may underlie the upright and the inverted Chinese character, respectively.
中国人长期从事文字处理。已经证明，当人们具备相关专业知识时，呈现的方向会影响几种类型的刺激的感知，例如面孔、身体和场景。然而，倒置对汉字处理的神经机制的影响尚未得到充分讨论。在本研究中，进行了一项功能磁共振成像 (fMRI) 实验，以检查倒置对汉字处理的影响，该实验使用汉字、面孔和房屋作为刺激。感兴趣区域分析表明，倒置会导致左梭状回字符优势区、双侧梭状回物体优势区和双侧枕叶物体优势区的汉字神经反应增加，并且这种汉字处理的反应模式的倒置引起的变化与面孔处理非常相似，但与房屋处理截然不同。全脑分析表明，直立字符会招募几个与语音和语义处理相关的语言区域，而倒置字符会激活与视觉信息处理相关的广泛区域。我们的发现表明，当字符倒置时，视觉皮层中的字符优先处理路径会转移到通用对象处理流，这表明直立和倒置的汉字可能分别由不同的机制来支撑。
