Abstract
When reading a narrative text, both the dorsal and ventral visual systems are activated. To illustrate the patterns of interactions between the dorsal and ventral visual systems in text reading, we conducted analyses of functional connectivity (FC) and effective connectivity (EC) in a left-hemispheric network for reading-driven functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and resting-state fMRI (rs-fMRI) data. In reading-driven fMRI (Experiment 1), we found significant FCs among the left middle frontal gyrus (MFG), the left intraparietal sulcus (IPS), and the visual word form area (VWFA), and there were top–down effects from the left MFG to the left IPS, from the left MFG to the VWFA, and from the left IPS to the VWFA. In rs-fMRI (Experiment 2), we identified FCs and ECs for MFG-IPS and IPS-VWFA connections. In addition, the brain–behavior relationship in resting states showed that the dorsal connection was more associated with reading fluency relative to lexical decision. The combination of two experiments revealed that the MFG-IPS and the VWFA-IPS connections were shared connections both in reading-driven fMRI and rs-fMRI, and that the MFG-VWFA was specific connectivity in reading-driven fMRI. These results suggest that top–down effects from the dorsal visual system to ventral visual system play an important role in text reading.
Highlights
Reading of a narrative text ( ‘text reading’) plays a key role in our daily lives
Narrative text reading in our daily lives requires readers to integrate multiple words in an entire sentence, but traditional neuroimaging studies in reading have tended to present the stimuli as one word at a time in a rapid serial visual presentation paradigm (RSVP, see Price, 2012 for a review)
Researchers have started to work on paradigms that can present entire sentences or passages in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) experiments (e.g., Hillen et al, 2013; Regev et al, 2013; Choi et al, 2014; Schuster et al, 2015; Wang X.J. et al, 2015), and as a result the role of the dorsal visual regions in reading (Corbetta and Shulman, 2002; McDowell et al, 2008; Herweg et al, 2014) has been examined
Summary
Reading of a narrative text ( ‘text reading’) plays a key role in our daily lives. Text reading requires a dynamic integration of vision, visual attention, and linguistic processes of the materials. The processes involved in text reading may follow this dual-route principle. While previous functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies have generally implicated a key role of the ventral visual system for word reading (for a review, see Dehaene and Cohen, 2011), recent fMRI studies in naturalistic text reading have proposed that the dorsal visual regions [e.g., intraparietal sulcus (IPS)] play a role in visual/spatial attention or eye movements during reading of an entire sentence (Hillen et al, 2013; Choi et al, 2014)
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