Occipital and orbitofrontal hemodynamics during naturally paced reading: An fNIRS study

Abstract

Humans typically read at incredibly fast rates, because they predict likely occurring words from a given context. Here, we used functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to track the ultra-rapid hemodynamic responses of words presented every 280 ms in a naturally paced sentence context. We found a lower deoxygenation to unpredictable than to predictable words. The greater hemodynamic responses to unexpected words suggests that the visual features of expected words have been pre-activated previous to stimulus presentation. Second, we tested opposing theoretical proposals about the role of the medial orbitofrontal cortex (OFC): Either OFC may respond to the breach of expectation; or OFC is activated when the present stimulus matches the prediction. A significant interaction between word frequency and predictability indicated OFC responses to breaches of expectation for low-but not for high-frequency words: OFC is sensitive to both, bottom-up processing as mediated by word frequency, as well as top-down predictions. Particularly, when a rare word is unpredictable, OFC becomes active. Finally, we discuss how a high temporal resolution can help future studies to disentangle the hemodynamic responses of single trials in such an ultra-rapid event succession as naturally paced reading.

On Elementary Affective Decisions: To Like Or Not to Like, That Is the Question

“…Thus, Bohrn et al (2012b) observed data compatible with the interpretation that anti-proverbs evoking two contrasting responses that have to be related (that of the familiar proverb and the novel word), required a greater semantic integration effort, as mirrored by stronger ventral inferior frontal gyrus activation than for control stimuli (much as with the aforementioned bivalent NNCs; Forgács et al, 2012; Kuhlmann et al, 2016). Moreover, concurrent increased medial orbitofrontal cortex and striatal activation likely reflected the rewarding aspect of successful semantic integration (a kind of “Aha” experience; Bar et al, 2006; Hofmann et al, 2014) and supports both the findings and views of the naturalizing aesthetics studies discussed above.…”

Interactive activation and competition models and semantic context: From behavioral to brain data

“…Penolazzi et al, 2007;Sereno and Rayner, 2003;Skrandies, 1998). A recent optical imaging study using the same experimental design confirmed the hypothesis that this results from occipital cortex activation (Dambacher et al, 2009;Hofmann et al, 2014). A potential explanation is that expectations generated at a semantic level feed activation back to the lowest level of feature representations in the occipital cortex (cf.…”

“…This function of a process model has been the traditional role and strength of IAMs since their initial proposal. In sum, the novel level of semantic representations in the AROM extends IAMs of visual-orthographic processing by the mechanism of associative spreading of activation between semantic word units (Anderson, 1983;Collins and Loftus, 1975): If there is enough excitation from associated items or common associates in the experimental context, a word unit can become pre-activated (Hofmann et al, 2014).…”

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