Department of Psychology, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan.
Department of Psychology, Soochow University, Taipei, Taiwan.
Neuropsychologia. 2022 Jan 7;164:108090. doi: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2021.108090. Epub 2021 Nov 18.
This study investigates whether stimulus inversion influences neural responses of Chinese character recognition similarly to its effect on face recognition in category-selective and object-related brain areas using functional magnetic resonance imaging. Participants performed a one-back matching task for simple (one radical) and compound (two radicals) Chinese characters and faces with upright and inverted orientations. Inverted stimuli produced slower response times with stronger activity within the fusiform gyrus (FG) than upright stimuli for faces and Chinese characters. While common inversion-related activation was identified in the left FG among stimulus types, we observed a significant inter-regional correlation between the left FG and the intraparietal sulcus for face inversion. Importantly, analyses of region-of-interest (ROI) multivariate pattern classification showed that classifiers trained on face inversion can decode the representations of character inversion in the character-selective ROI. However, this was not true for face inversion in face-selective ROIs when the classifiers were trained on characters. Similar activity patterns for character and face inversion were observed in the object-related ROIs. We also showed higher decoding accuracy for upright stimuli in the face-selective ROI than in the character-selective ROI but this was not true for inverted ones or when patterns were examined in the object-related ROIs. Together, our results support shared and distinct configural representations for character and face recognition in category-selective and object-related brain areas.
本研究使用功能磁共振成像技术，考察了刺激反转是否会对类别选择性和物体相关脑区的汉字识别的神经反应产生类似于其对面部识别的影响。参与者进行了简单（一个偏旁）和复合（两个偏旁）汉字和正立与倒立的面孔的一背匹配任务。与正立刺激相比，倒置刺激在面孔和汉字的梭状回（FG）中产生了较慢的反应时间和更强的活动。虽然在刺激类型之间在左侧 FG 中识别出了共同的反转相关激活，但我们观察到左侧 FG 与顶内沟之间存在显著的区域间相关性，用于面孔反转。重要的是，基于感兴趣区域（ROI）的多变量模式分类分析表明，在面孔选择性 ROI 中训练的分类器可以对面孔反转的特征反转进行解码。但是，当在特征选择性 ROI 中训练分类器时，这种情况不适用于面孔反转。在物体相关 ROI 中，也观察到了字符和面孔反转的相似活动模式。我们还表明，在面孔选择性 ROI 中，与字符选择性 ROI 相比，正立刺激的解码精度更高，但对于倒立刺激或在物体相关 ROI 中检查模式时则不是这样。总的来说，我们的结果支持类别选择性和物体相关脑区中字符和面孔识别的共享和独特的结构表示。
