Reading instruction causes changes in category-selective visual cortex
By
Jason Yeatman,
Sendy Caffarra,
Maggie Clark,
Suzanne M Ender,
Liesbeth Gijbels,
Sung Jun Joo,
Emily C Kubota,
Patricia K Kuhl,
Eric Larson,
Daniel R. McCloy,
Gabrielle O'Brien,
Erica R Peterson,
Megumi E Takada,
Samu Taulu
Posted 06 Feb 2022
bioRxiv DOI: 10.1101/2022.02.02.477919
Education sculpts specialized neural circuits for skills like reading that are critical to success in modern society but were not anticipated by the selective pressures of evolution. Does the emergence of brain regions that selectively process novel visual stimuli like words occur at the expense of cortical representations of other stimulus categories like faces and objects? To answer this question we designed a randomized controlled trial where pre-literate children (five years of age) were randomly assigned to intervention programs that either taught reading skills (Letter Intervention) or oral language comprehension skills (Language Intervention). Magnetoencephalography (MEG) data collected before and after the interventions revealed that being assigned to the Letter versus Language Intervention induced different patterns of changes in category selective responses in high-level visual cortex. We found moderate support for the notion that words compete with other objects for cortical territory as children become attuned to this new class of visual stimuli. How these changes play out over a longer timescale is still unclear but, based on these data, we can surmise that high-level visual cortex undergoes rapid changes as children enter school and begin establishing new skills like literacy.
Download data
- Downloaded 230 times
- Download rankings, all-time:
- Site-wide: 159,055
- In neuroscience: None
- Year to date:
- Site-wide: 16,425
- Since beginning of last month:
- Site-wide: 65,762
Altmetric data
Downloads over time
Distribution of downloads per paper, site-wide
PanLingua
News
- 27 Nov 2020: The website and API now include results pulled from medRxiv as well as bioRxiv.
- 18 Dec 2019: We're pleased to announce PanLingua, a new tool that enables you to search for machine-translated bioRxiv preprints using more than 100 different languages.
- 21 May 2019: PLOS Biology has published a community page about Rxivist.org and its design.
- 10 May 2019: The paper analyzing the Rxivist dataset has been published at eLife.
- 1 Mar 2019: We now have summary statistics about bioRxiv downloads and submissions.
- 8 Feb 2019: Data from Altmetric is now available on the Rxivist details page for every preprint. Look for the "donut" under the download metrics.
- 30 Jan 2019: preLights has featured the Rxivist preprint and written about our findings.
- 22 Jan 2019: Nature just published an article about Rxivist and our data.
- 13 Jan 2019: The Rxivist preprint is live!