Pillet Ineke, Cerrahoğlu Begüm, Philips Roxane Victoria, Dumoulin Serge, Op de Beeck Hans
Department of Brain and Cognition, Leuven Brain Institute, KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium.
2LPN (Laboratoire Lorrain de Psychologie et Neurosciences de la Dynamique des Comportements), Université de Lorraine, France.
Imaging Neurosci (Camb). 2024 Jun 25;2. doi: 10.1162/imag_a_00196. eCollection 2024.
Recent reviews emphasized the need for investigating the complexity of multiplesubareas of word selectivity and how this relates to selectivity for othervisual categories, at the individual level at a high spatial resolution (withoutnormalization or smoothing). To investigate this, both on the brain surface andin the representational space of the occipitotemporal cortex, we presented 19participants with images of 20 different categories during 7T fMRI. Thesecategories included several word-like conditions, and in addition cover many ofthe dimensions that have been suggested to define object space, such as animacyand real-world size. In the left hemisphere, we found three subareas of thevisual word form area (VWFA) and one extra subarea around the pFusface-selective area. We also observed several areas of selectivity to hands thatcould consistently guide the localization of word and face areas. No clearpredictive anatomical landmarks were found. Results of the right hemisphere wereless clear, in part due to weaker word selectivity. In the representationalspace, word selectivity stood out from other categories. It had multipleneighboring categories at a similar distance (e.g., faces, bodies, hands, cars),so no special relationship was found with, for example, faces. These resultsenable a consistent and reliable way to locate subareas of word selectivity andmay inspire future research into words in the representational space of theoccipitotemporal cortex.
近期的综述强调了在高空间分辨率（无归一化或平滑处理）的个体层面上，研究单词选择性多个子区域的复杂性以及这与其他视觉类别选择性之间关系的必要性。为了对此进行研究，我们在7T功能磁共振成像（fMRI）期间，向19名参与者展示了20种不同类别的图像，这些图像既包括大脑表面的，也包括枕颞叶皮质表征空间中的。这些类别包括几种类似单词的情况，此外还涵盖了许多被认为可定义物体空间的维度，如生物性和现实世界大小。在左半球，我们发现了视觉词形区（VWFA）的三个子区域以及梭状回面孔选择性区域周围的一个额外子区域。我们还观察到了几个对手部有选择性的区域，这些区域可以持续指导单词和面孔区域的定位。未发现明确的预测性解剖学标志。右半球的结果不太明确，部分原因是单词选择性较弱。在表征空间中，单词选择性与其他类别有所不同。它有多个距离相近的相邻类别（如面孔、身体、手部、汽车），因此未发现与例如面孔有特殊关系。这些结果为定位单词选择性子区域提供了一种一致且可靠的方法，并可能激发未来对枕颞叶皮质表征空间中单词的研究。
