Petersen S E, Fox P T, Snyder A Z, Raichle M E
Department of Neurology and Neurological Surgery, Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis, MO 63110.
Science. 1990 Aug 31;249(4972):1041-4. doi: 10.1126/science.2396097.
Visual presentation of words activates extrastriate regions of the occipital lobes of the brain. When analyzed by positron emission tomography (PET), certain areas in the left, medial extrastriate visual cortex were activated by visually presented pseudowords that obey English spelling rules, as well as by actual words. These areas were not activated by nonsense strings of letters or letter-like forms. Thus visual word form computations are based on learned distinctions between words and nonwords. In addition, during passive presentation of words, but not pseudowords, activation occurred in a left frontal area that is related to semantic processing. These findings support distinctions made in cognitive psychology and computational modeling between high-level visual and semantic computations on single words and describe the anatomy that may underlie these distinctions.
单词的视觉呈现会激活大脑枕叶的纹外区域。通过正电子发射断层扫描（PET）分析发现，当呈现遵循英语拼写规则的视觉假词以及实际单词时，左侧内侧纹外视觉皮层的某些区域会被激活。而无意义的字母串或类似字母的形式不会激活这些区域。因此，视觉单词形式的计算是基于对单词和非单词的习得区分。此外，在单词的被动呈现过程中（而非假词），与语义处理相关的左侧额叶区域会出现激活。这些发现支持了认知心理学和计算模型中关于单个单词的高级视觉和语义计算之间的区分，并描述了可能构成这些区分基础的解剖结构。
