Letter binding and invariant recognition of masked words: behavioral and neuroimaging evidence.

Stanislas Dehaene (1, 2) , Antoinette Jobert (3) , L. Naccache (2) , Philippe Ciuciu (4) , J.-B. Poline (5) , D. Le Bihan , L. Cohen (2)

1 SHFJ - Service Hospitalier Frédéric Joliot
2 LCogn - Neuroimagerie cognitive
3 IDHE - Institutions et Dynamiques Historiques de l'Economie
4 LNAO - Laboratoire de Neuroimagerie Assistée par Ordinateur
5 NEUROSPIN - Service NEUROSPIN

Fluent readers recognize visual words across changes in case and retinal location, while maintaining a high sensitivity to the arrangement of letters. To evaluate the automaticity and functional anatomy of invariant word recognition, we measured brain activity during subliminal masked priming. By preceding target words with an unrelated prime, a repeated prime, or an anagram made of the same letters, we separated letter-level and whole-word codes. By changing the case and the retinal location of primes and targets, we evaluated the invariance of those codes. Our results indicate that an invariant binding of letters into words is achieved unconsciously through a series of increasingly invariant stages in the left occipito-temporal pathway.

Domains: Life Sciences [q-bio]; Bioengineering; Imaging; Cognitive science; Neuroscience

Stanislas Dehaene, Antoinette Jobert, L. Naccache, Philippe Ciuciu, J.-B. Poline, et al.. Letter binding and invariant recognition of masked words: behavioral and neuroimaging evidence.. Psychological Science, 2004, 15 (5), pp.307-13. ⟨10.1111/j.0956-7976.2004.00674.x⟩. ⟨cea-00333665⟩