Representation of visual symbols in the visual word processing network

Muayqil, Taim; Davies‐Thompson, Jodie; Barton, Jason J.S.

doi:10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2015.01.045

Cited by 16 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 59 publications

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“…The network involved in music reading seems extensive (Wong & Gauthier, 2010), including the visual cortex (Mongelli et al, 2017) and the fusiform gyrus (Muayqil, Davies-Thompson, & Barton, 2015). Overall, these findings agree with findings on expertise of various sorts, revealing that the functional architecture in the brain is strongly modulated by musical expertise.…”

Section: Musicians' Visual Expertisesupporting

confidence: 83%

Musical expertise, musical style, and visual attention

Jónasson

Kristjánsson

Jóhannesson

2021

Psychology of Music

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Research has repeatedly demonstrated that people with experience within a particular domain have exceptional cognitive abilities for domain-specific information. Chess masters, for instance, are far better at memorizing visually presented chess positions than amateurs, and professional American football experts are highly sensitive to semantic changes in domain-related scenes. However, for non-domain-related material, experts’ performance becomes similar to novice performance. But how does this apply to music? We compared experienced musicians’ and novices’ attentional function and visual working memory using the change blindness flicker paradigm. The task was to detect minor changes between two otherwise identical music scores of differing styles: traditional (C-major, regular rhythms), contemporary (atonal, irregular rhythms), and random (nonsense music). We expected that (1) experienced musicians would detect changes faster, (2) the between-group difference would be larger for traditional than contemporary music, and (3) the groups’ performance would be more similar for random music. The experienced musicians detected changes significantly faster in both the contemporary and traditional music material, whereas the difference was nonsignificant for the random condition. The difference between groups was largest for contemporary music, despite its higher level of complexity. We discuss these results in relation to existing literature on expertise in visual information processing.

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Section: Musicians' Visual Expertisesupporting

confidence: 83%

Musical expertise, musical style, and visual attention

Jónasson

Kristjánsson

Jóhannesson

2021

Psychology of Music

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“…Similarly, it is thought that the visual word form area in the left fusiform gyrus participates in the pre-lexical perceptual processing of visual word forms (Dehaene, Cohen, Sigman, & Vinckier, 2005;McCandliss, Cohen, & Dehaene, 2003), extracting letter shapes from combinations of linear and curved elements that then interact with abstract representations of letters and words, followed by access to semantic and phonemic processes. In support, imaging studies show that the left fusiform gyrus is equally responsive to other high-frequency line stimuli such as the scripts of unfamiliar languages and real and pseudo-musical notation (Muayqil, Davies-Thompson, & Barton, 2015), while patients with lesions of the left posterior fusiform gyrus have not only alexia but also deficits in processing chequerboards and unfamiliar scripts (Roberts et al, 2013). Less is known about the extraction of font and handwriting.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Word and text processing in developmental prosopagnosia

Rubino

Corrow

et al. 2016

Cognitive Neuropsychology

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The "many-to-many" hypothesis proposes that visual object processing is supported by distributed circuits that overlap for different object categories. For faces and words the hypothesis posits that both posterior fusiform regions contribute to both face and visual word perception and predicts that unilateral lesions impairing one will affect the other. However, studies testing this hypothesis have produced mixed results. We evaluated visual word processing in subjects with developmental prosopagnosia, a condition linked to right posterior fusiform abnormalities. Ten developmental prosopagnosic subjects performed a word-length effect task and a task evaluating the recognition of word content across variations in text style, and the recognition of style across variations in word content. All subjects had normal word-length effects. One had prolonged sorting time for word recognition in handwritten stimuli. These results suggest that the deficit in developmental prosopagnosia is unlikely to affect visual word processing, contrary to predictions of the many-to-many hypothesis.

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“…In humans, there is also evidence for segregated activations for letters and numerals in the fusiform gyrus (Polk et al, 2002;Shum et al, 2013;Abboud et al, 2015), and for Chinese vs alphabetic stimuli in the early visual cortex (Szwed et al, 2014). There are also some indications of segregated activations for printed words and musical notation in the occipitotemporal cortex (Wong and Gauthier, 2010a), but this evidence is controversial (Muayqil et al, 2015) and is not supported by statistical comparisons of activation topography between words and music.…”

Section: Accepted Manuscriptmentioning

confidence: 99%

Music and words in the visual cortex: The impact of musical expertise

Mongelli

Dehaene

Vinckier

et al. 2017

Cortex

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How does the human visual system accommodate expertise for two simultaneously acquired symbolic systems? We used fMRI to compare activations induced in the visual cortex by musical notation, written words and other classes of objects, in professional musicians and in musically naïve controls. First, irrespective of expertise, selective activations for music were posterior and lateral to activations for words in the left occipitotemporal cortex. This indicates that symbols characterized by different visual features engage distinct cortical areas. Second, musical expertise increased the volume of activations for music and led to an anterolateral displacement of word-related activations. In musicians, there was also a dramatic increase of the brain-scale networks connected to the music-selective visual areas. Those findings reveal that acquiring a double visual expertise involves an expansion of category-selective areas, the development of novel longdistance functional connectivity, and possibly some competition between categories for the colonization of cortical space.

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Representation of visual symbols in the visual word processing network

Cited by 16 publications

References 59 publications

Musical expertise, musical style, and visual attention

Musical expertise, musical style, and visual attention

Word and text processing in developmental prosopagnosia

Music and words in the visual cortex: The impact of musical expertise

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