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Mechanisms underlying category learning in the human ventral occipito-temporal cortex
oleh: Xiangqi Luo, Mingyang Li, Jiahong Zeng, Zhiyun Dai, Zhenjiang Cui, Minhong Zhu, Mengxin Tian, Jiahao Wu, Zaizhu Han
Format: | Article |
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Diterbitkan: | Elsevier 2024-02-01 |
Deskripsi
The human ventral occipito-temporal cortex (VOTC) has evolved into specialized regions that process specific categories, such as words, tools, and animals. The formation of these areas is driven by bottom-up visual and top-down nonvisual experiences. However, the specific mechanisms through which top-down nonvisual experiences modulate category-specific regions in the VOTC are still unknown. To address this question, we conducted a study in which participants were trained for approximately 13 h to associate three sets of novel meaningless figures with different top-down nonvisual features: the wordlike category with word features, the non-wordlike category with nonword features, and the visual familiarity condition with no nonvisual features. Pre- and post-training functional MRI (fMRI) experiments were used to measure brain activity during stimulus presentation. Our results revealed that training induced a categorical preference for the two training categories within the VOTC. Moreover, the locations of two training category-specific regions exhibited a notable overlap. Remarkably, within the overlapping category-specific region, training resulted in a dissociation in activation intensity and pattern between the two training categories. These findings provide important insights into how different nonvisual categorical information is encoded in the human VOTC.