The Neural Mechanism Underlying Education: Comparing Chinese Literates, Ex-Illiterates, and Illiterates

• In Event: 41.083 - Roundtable Session 15
  In Roundtable Session: 41.083-12 - Cracking the Knowledge Bases of Educational Equity: Integrating Findings From the Laboratory With Those From the Classroom

Abstract

Writing systems as cultural tool shape the brain structure and functions with the sustained exposure experiences. Although written language as a product of cultural products have a rather short history when being compared to other visual stimuli, people develop a complete neural circuitry for reading in the short span of 5400 years which makes it possible to understand and use written language. Stanislas Dehaene put forward the theory of “recycling of cortical map” to explain the reason why the neural circuitry can be formed in such short time. The theory suggests that during the development of a novel cultural product, the cortical region which used to play a similar function may be partly or completely occupied. Present study was based on the theory of “recycling of cortical map”, trying to find out whether there is a competition effect of learning to read on cortical network for faces. We used words, scrambled words, faces and scrambled faces as visual stimuli and made the participants focus on the screen by applying an oddball detection paradigm. At the same time, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging to measure the brain responses to the different stimuli to evaluate the competition effect. The results showed that the region in left fusiform gyrus would be evoked by words compared to scrambled words in literate group which is in accord with the previous findings that the brain region for word processing which is called visual word form area (VWFA) is located in left fusiform gyrus. When viewing Chinese words, native Chinese participants also showed activation in left middle frontal gyrus which was considered to be a specific brain region for reading Chinese. More importantly, learning to read did have a competition with faces in left fusiform gyrus manifested by that when we chose the VWFA confirmed by prior localizer scan, the activation to faces decrease in this region. A further regression showed that with higher reading score, the activation on faces reduced more drastically and fast at 16mm from the peak of faces in VWFA which confirmed the existing of a competition effect.

Author

• Yi zhang