Price C J, Wise R J, Frackowiak R S
Wellcome Department of Cognitive Neurology, Institute of Neurology, London, UK.
Cereb Cortex. 1996 Jan-Feb;6(1):62-70. doi: 10.1093/cercor/6.1.62.
This study demonstrates that even when subjects are instructed to perform a nonlinguistic visual feature detection task, the mere presence of words or pseudowords in the visual field activates a widespread neuronal network that is congruent with classical language areas. The implication of this result is that subjects will process words beyond the functional demands of the task. Therefore, contrasting brain activity in a word task that explicitly requires a cognitive function with a word task in which the function is activated implicitly will not necessarily isolate the brain area of interest. Furthermore, in most brain regions, we found that pseudowords, which have unfamiliar phonological associations and no associated semantic association, produce greater activation than words. Greater brain activity associated with pseudowords illustrates that unfamiliar stimuli that are unable to access word associations may activate the neuronal network more strongly than familiar words for which access occurs with ease.
本研究表明，即使指示受试者执行非语言视觉特征检测任务，视野中单词或伪词的单纯出现也会激活一个与经典语言区域一致的广泛神经网络。这一结果的含义是，受试者会处理超出任务功能需求的单词。因此，将明确需要认知功能的单词任务中的大脑活动与功能被隐性激活的单词任务中的大脑活动进行对比，不一定能分离出感兴趣的脑区。此外，在大多数脑区，我们发现，具有不熟悉语音关联且无相关语义关联的伪词比单词产生更强的激活。与伪词相关的更强的大脑活动表明，无法获取单词关联的不熟悉刺激可能比易于获取关联的熟悉单词更强烈地激活神经网络。
