Nobre A C, Allison T, McCarthy G
Neuropsychology Laboratory, Veterans Administration Medical Center, West Haven, Connecticut 06516.
Nature. 1994 Nov 17;372(6503):260-3. doi: 10.1038/372260a0.
Studies of primates and of patients with brain lesions have shown that the visual system represents the external world in regions and pathways specialized to compute visual features and attributes. For example, object recognition is performed by a ventral pathway located in the inferior portion of the temporal lobe. We studied visual processing of words and word-like stimuli (letter-strings) by recording field potentials directly from the human inferior temporal lobe. Our results showed that two discrete portions of the fusiform gyrus responded preferentially to letter-strings. A region of the posterior fusiform gyrus responded equally to words and non-words, and was unaffected by the semantic context in which words were presented. In contrast, a region of the anterior fusiform gyrus was sensitive to these stimulus dimensions. These regions were distinct from areas that responded to other types of complex visual stimuli, including faces and coloured patterns, and thus form a functionally specialized stream within the ventral visual pathway.
对灵长类动物和脑损伤患者的研究表明，视觉系统在专门用于计算视觉特征和属性的区域及通路中呈现外部世界。例如，物体识别由位于颞叶下部的腹侧通路执行。我们通过直接记录人类颞下回的场电位来研究单词和类单词刺激（字母串）的视觉处理。我们的结果表明，梭状回的两个离散部分对字母串有优先反应。梭状回后部的一个区域对单词和非单词的反应相同，并且不受呈现单词的语义背景的影响。相比之下，梭状回前部的一个区域对这些刺激维度敏感。这些区域与对其他类型的复杂视觉刺激（包括面孔和彩色图案）有反应的区域不同，因此在腹侧视觉通路中形成了一个功能专门化的信息流。
