Behavioral, functional brain imaging (fMRI), electrophysiological (ERP) and neuropsychological experiments will investigate how letters are perceived. The project is motivated by a framework accounting for specialization for faces and letters in extrastriate cortex by a detailed analysis of the different recognition goals and the information available for the recognition of these categories. The experiments will evaluate the hypothesis that what is """"""""special"""""""" about expert letter perception is that regularities in letter style (including orientation, case and font) is used to facilitate letter recognition (access to letter identities). In particular, we will investigate how readers may learn to use the regularity of print to facilitate letter perception at the basic level, how this ability differs from general object recognition strategies and whether it leads to specialization of letter-specific areas in visual cortex. This project has four aims: I) identify behavioral effects that are special to the way experienced readers recognize letters; II) study the basic properties of letter-selective areas in visual cortex with ERP and fMRI; III) use behavioral, fMRI and ERP measurements to investigate the hypothesis that a history of poor reading expertise in dyslexic individuals leads to abnormal specialization of the letter-specific system; IV) test predictions about lesions in areas of the visual cortex specialized for letters in individuals with acquired peripheral dyslexia (pure alexia). This research will investigate how much visual factors alone contribute to specialization for letters. This information is necessary to understand linguistic influences on reading and would extend an emerging framework interpreting category-specific effects in extrastriate cortex in terms of the recruitment through experience of processes best suited for different recognition goals. Understanding what characterizes expert letter perception is also necessary to understand disorders in which this expertise is not acquired (such as dyslexia) or is lost (such as low vision).
| McGugin, Rankin W; Van Gulick, Ana E; Gauthier, Isabel (2016) Cortical Thickness in Fusiform Face Area Predicts Face and Object Recognition Performance. J Cogn Neurosci 28:282-94 |
| Chua, Kao-Wei; Gauthier, Isabel (2016) Category-specific learned attentional bias to object parts. Atten Percept Psychophys 78:44-51 |
| Van Gulick, Ana E; McGugin, Rankin W; Gauthier, Isabel (2016) Measuring nonvisual knowledge about object categories: The Semantic Vanderbilt Expertise Test. Behav Res Methods 48:1178-96 |
| Cho, Sun-Joo; Wilmer, Jeremy; Herzmann, Grit et al. (2015) Item response theory analyses of the Cambridge Face Memory Test (CFMT). Psychol Assess 27:552-66 |
| Chua, Kao-Wei; Richler, Jennifer J; Gauthier, Isabel (2015) Holistic processing from learned attention to parts. J Exp Psychol Gen 144:723-9 |
| Folstein, Jonathan; Palmeri, Thomas J; Van Gulick, Ana E et al. (2015) Category Learning Stretches Neural Representations in Visual Cortex. Curr Dir Psychol Sci 24:17-23 |
| Ross, David A; Richler, Jennifer J; Gauthier, Isabel (2015) Reliability of composite-task measurements of holistic face processing. Behav Res Methods 47:736-43 |
| Ross, David A; Gauthier, Isabel (2015) Holistic Processing in the Composite Task Depends on Face Size. Vis cogn 23:533-545 |
| Richler, Jennifer J; Palmeri, Thomas J; Gauthier, Isabel (2015) Holistic processing does not require configural variability. Psychon Bull Rev 22:974-9 |
| McGugin, Rankin Williams; Van Gulick, Ana E; Tamber-Rosenau, Benjamin J et al. (2015) Expertise Effects in Face-Selective Areas are Robust to Clutter and Diverted Attention, but not to Competition. Cereb Cortex 25:2610-22 |
Showing the most recent 10 out of 58 publications
