Xiangqi Luo, Mingyang Li, Jiahong Zeng, Zhiyun Dai, Zhenjiang Cui, Minhong Zhu, Mengxin Tian, Jiahao Wu, Zaizhu Han
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 hours 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...
January 17, 2024: NeuroImage