The Importance of Handwriting Experience on the Development of the Literate Brain

2017 ◽  
Vol 26 (6) ◽  
pp. 502-508 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karin H. James
Keyword(s):  
Young Children ◽  
Visual Processing ◽  
Functional Neuroimaging ◽  
Letter Recognition ◽  
Facilitatory Effect ◽  
Symbol Recognition ◽  
Facilitative Effect ◽  
Behavioral Measures ◽  
Motor Systems ◽  
The Brain

Handwriting experience can have significant effects on the ability of young children to recognize letters. Why handwriting has this facilitative effect and how this is accomplished were explored in a series of studies using overt behavioral measures and functional neuroimaging of the brain in 4- to 5-year-old children. My colleagues and I showed that early handwriting practice affects visual symbol recognition because it results in the production of variable visual forms that aid in symbol understanding. Further, the mechanisms that support this understanding lay in the communication between visual and motor systems in the brain: Handwriting serves to link visual processing with motor experience, facilitating subsequent letter recognition skills. These results are interpreted in the larger context of the facilitatory effect that learning through action has on perceptual capabilities.

What Has Direct Cortical and Subcortical Electrostimulation Taught Us about Neurolinguistics?

2019 ◽  
pp. 185-211
Author(s):  
Hugues Duffau
Keyword(s):  
White Matter ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Functional Neuroimaging ◽  
Great Accuracy ◽  
Subcortical White Matter ◽  
Cerebral Lesions ◽  
Physiological Basis ◽  
Postoperative Mri ◽  
The Brain

Investigating the neural and physiological basis of language is one of the most important challenges in neurosciences. Direct electrical stimulation (DES), usually performed in awake patients during surgery for cerebral lesions, is a reliable tool for detecting both cortical and subcortical (white matter and deep grey nuclei) regions crucial for cognitive functions, especially language. DES transiently interacts locally with a small cortical or axonal site, but also nonlocally, as the focal perturbation will disrupt the entire subnetwork sustaining a given function. Thus, in contrast to functional neuroimaging, DES represents a unique opportunity to identify with great accuracy and reproducibility, in vivo in humans, the structures that are actually indispensable to the function, by inducing a transient virtual lesion based on the inhibition of a subcircuit lasting a few seconds. Currently, this is the sole technique that is able to directly investigate the functional role of white matter tracts in humans. Thus, combining transient disturbances elicited by DES with the anatomical data provided by pre- and postoperative MRI enables to achieve reliable anatomo-functional correlations, supporting a network organization of the brain, and leading to the reappraisal of models of language representation. Finally, combining serial peri-operative functional neuroimaging and online intraoperative DES allows the study of mechanisms underlying neuroplasticity. This chapter critically reviews the basic principles of DES, its advantages and limitations, and what DES can reveal about the neural foundations of language, that is, the large-scale distribution of language areas in the brain, their connectivity, and their ability to reorganize.

scholarly journals Perceiving actions before they happen: psychological dimensions scaffold neural action prediction

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark A Thornton ◽  
Diana I Tamir
Keyword(s):  
Magnetic Resonance Imaging ◽  
Functional Neuroimaging ◽  
Social World ◽  
Action Space ◽  
Action Prediction ◽  
Functional Magnetic Resonance ◽  
Resonance Imaging ◽  
The Social ◽  
Psychological Dimensions ◽  
The Brain

Abstract The social world buzzes with action. People constantly walk, talk, eat, work, play, snooze and so on. To interact with others successfully, we need to both understand their current actions and predict their future actions. Here we used functional neuroimaging to test the hypothesis that people do both at the same time: when the brain perceives an action, it simultaneously encodes likely future actions. Specifically, we hypothesized that the brain represents perceived actions using a map that encodes which actions will occur next: the six-dimensional Abstraction, Creation, Tradition, Food(-relevance), Animacy and Spiritualism Taxonomy (ACT-FAST) action space. Within this space, the closer two actions are, the more likely they are to precede or follow each other. To test this hypothesis, participants watched a video featuring naturalistic sequences of actions while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanning. We first use a decoding model to demonstrate that the brain uses ACT-FAST to represent current actions. We then successfully predicted as-yet unseen actions, up to three actions into the future, based on their proximity to the current action’s coordinates in ACT-FAST space. This finding suggests that the brain represents actions using a six-dimensional action space that gives people an automatic glimpse of future actions.

Behavioral measures and EEG monitoring using the Brain Symmetry Index during the Wada test in children

2012 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 247-253 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jurriaan M. Peters ◽  
Meritxell Tomas-Fernandez ◽  
Michel J.A.M. van Putten ◽  
Tobias Loddenkemper
Keyword(s):  
Eeg Monitoring ◽  
Wada Test ◽  
Behavioral Measures ◽  
Symmetry Index ◽  
The Brain

Musical training improves memory for instrumental music, but not vocal music or words

2018 ◽  
Vol 48 (1) ◽  
pp. 150-159
Author(s):  
Jonathan M. P. Wilbiks ◽  
Sean Hutchins
Keyword(s):  
Instrumental Music ◽  
Musical Training ◽  
Vocal Music ◽  
Verbal Material ◽  
The Other ◽  
Musical Experience ◽  
Facilitative Effect ◽  
Musical Excerpts ◽  
And Performance ◽  
The Brain

In previous research, there exists some debate about the effects of musical training on memory for verbal material. The current research examines this relationship, while also considering musical training effects on memory for musical excerpts. Twenty individuals with musical training were tested and their results were compared to 20 age-matched individuals with no musical experience. Musically trained individuals demonstrated a higher level of memory for classical musical excerpts, with no significant differences for popular musical excerpts or for words. These findings are in support of previous research showing that while music and words overlap in terms of their processing in the brain, there is not necessarily a facilitative effect between training in one domain and performance in the other.

Context-Dependent Modulation of Early Visual Cortical Responses to Numerical and Nonnumerical Magnitudes

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-12
Author(s):  
Joonkoo Park ◽  
Sonia Godbole ◽  
Marty G. Woldorff ◽  
Elizabeth M. Brannon
Keyword(s):  
Visual Processing ◽  
Context Dependency ◽  
Numerical Magnitude ◽  
Continuous Variables ◽  
Processing Stream ◽  
Cortical Responses ◽  
Early Visual Cortex ◽  
Context Dependent ◽  
Visual Cortical ◽  
The Brain

Abstract Whether and how the brain encodes discrete numerical magnitude differently from continuous nonnumerical magnitude is hotly debated. In a previous set of studies, we orthogonally varied numerical (numerosity) and nonnumerical (size and spacing) dimensions of dot arrays and demonstrated a strong modulation of early visual evoked potentials (VEPs) by numerosity and not by nonnumerical dimensions. Although very little is known about the brain's response to systematic changes in continuous dimensions of a dot array, some authors intuit that the visual processing stream must be more sensitive to continuous magnitude information than to numerosity. To address this possibility, we measured VEPs of participants viewing dot arrays that changed exclusively in one nonnumerical magnitude dimension at a time (size or spacing) while holding numerosity constant and compared this to a condition where numerosity was changed while holding size and spacing constant. We found reliable but small neural sensitivity to exclusive changes in size and spacing; however, changing numerosity elicited a much more robust modulation of the VEPs. Together with previous work, these findings suggest that sensitivity to magnitude dimensions in early visual cortex is context dependent: The brain is moderately sensitive to changes in size and spacing when numerosity is held constant, but sensitivity to these continuous variables diminishes to a negligible level when numerosity is allowed to vary at the same time. Neurophysiological explanations for the encoding and context dependency of numerical and nonnumerical magnitudes are proposed within the framework of neuronal normalization.

scholarly journals Visual Navigation in Nocturnal Insects

Physiology ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 182-192 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric Warrant ◽  
Marie Dacke
Keyword(s):  
Visual Processing ◽  
Visual Navigation ◽  
Compound Eyes ◽  
Visual Landmarks ◽  
Processing Strategies ◽  
Straight Line ◽  
Highly Sensitive ◽  
Celestial Compass ◽  
The Brain

Despite their tiny eyes and brains, nocturnal insects have evolved a remarkable capacity to visually navigate at night. Whereas some use moonlight or the stars as celestial compass cues to maintain a straight-line course, others use visual landmarks to navigate to and from their nest. These impressive abilities rely on highly sensitive compound eyes and specialized visual processing strategies in the brain.

scholarly journals The Ability of Latin Letter Recognition in Early Children in Raudhatul Atfhal Annajamissa'adah Medan Tembung

2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 791-798
Author(s):  
Yuni Sitorus
Keyword(s):  
Early Childhood ◽  
Young Children ◽  
Letter Recognition ◽  
Learning Activities ◽  
Process Learning ◽  
Working Together ◽  
The Media ◽  
Teachers And Parents ◽  
Latin Letter ◽  
At Home

The background of the problem in this study is the ability to recognize Latin letters in early childhood in Raudhatul Atfhal Annajamissa'adah clay field and the teacher has not used an effective and efficient media in learning to recognize Latin letters. This study aims to process learning activities in the form of activities of teachers, students and parents in the ability to recognize Latin letters in early childhood in Raudhatul Atfhal Annajamissa'adah clay field through the process of learning the introduction of Latin letters in early childhood. The results showed that there were some weaknesses and strengths in learning Latin letters recognition. Because children lack enthusiasm in learning because the media conducted by teachers is less effective. Therefore there must be cooperation between parents of students and teachers so that students also study at home not only studying at Raudhatul Atfhal Annajamissa'adah clay field but at home must also be taught by parents so that the ability to recognize Latin letters can die. Because so far researchers see the lack of cooperation between teachers and parents in working together in educating young children in Raudhatul Atfhal Annajamissa'adah so the level of children's ability to recognize Latin letters is different.

scholarly journals The relative coding strength of object identity and nonidentity features in human occipito-temporal cortex and convolutional neural networks

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yaoda Xu ◽  
Maryam Vaziri-Pashkam
Keyword(s):  
Visual Processing ◽  
Visual Pathway ◽  
Feature Representation ◽  
Object Categorization ◽  
Object Identity ◽  
Visual Areas ◽  
Ventral Visual Pathway ◽  
Identity Representation ◽  
The Brain ◽  
Early Human

ABSTRACTAny given visual object input is characterized by multiple visual features, such as identity, position and size. Despite the usefulness of identity and nonidentity features in vision and their joint coding throughout the primate ventral visual processing pathway, they have so far been studied relatively independently. Here we document the relative coding strength of object identity and nonidentity features in a brain region and how this may change across the human ventral visual pathway. We examined a total of four nonidentity features, including two Euclidean features (position and size) and two non-Euclidean features (image statistics and spatial frequency content of an image). Overall, identity representation increased and nonidentity feature representation decreased along the ventral visual pathway, with identity outweighed the non-Euclidean features, but not the Euclidean ones, in higher levels of visual processing. A similar analysis was performed in 14 convolutional neural networks (CNNs) pretrained to perform object categorization with varying architecture, depth, and with/without recurrent processing. While the relative coding strength of object identity and nonidentity features in lower CNN layers matched well with that in early human visual areas, the match between higher CNN layers and higher human visual regions were limited. Similar results were obtained regardless of whether a CNN was trained with real-world or stylized object images that emphasized shape representation. Together, by measuring the relative coding strength of object identity and nonidentity features, our approach provided a new tool to characterize feature coding in the human brain and the correspondence between the brain and CNNs.SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENTThis study documented the relative coding strength of object identity compared to four types of nonidentity features along the human ventral visual processing pathway and compared brain responses with those of 14 CNNs pretrained to perform object categorization. Overall, identity representation increased and nonidentity feature representation decreased along the ventral visual pathway, with the coding strength of the different nonidentity features differed at higher levels of visual processing. While feature coding in lower CNN layers matched well with that of early human visual areas, the match between higher CNN layers and higher human visual regions were limited. Our approach provided a new tool to characterize feature coding in the human brain and the correspondence between the brain and CNNs.

scholarly journals Neuronal Correlates of Multiple Top–Down Signals during Covert Tracking of Moving Objects in Macaque Prefrontal Cortex

2012 ◽  
Vol 24 (10) ◽  
pp. 2043-2056 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ayano Matsushima ◽  
Masaki Tanaka
Keyword(s):  
Prefrontal Cortex ◽  
Object Tracking ◽  
Visual Processing ◽  
Moving Objects ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Selective Suppression ◽  
Internal Object ◽  
Object Segregation ◽  
Task Irrelevant ◽  
The Brain

Resistance to distraction is a key component of executive functions and is strongly linked to the prefrontal cortex. Recent evidence suggests that neural mechanisms exist for selective suppression of task-irrelevant information. However, neuronal signals related to selective suppression have not yet been identified, whereas nonselective surround suppression, which results from attentional enhancement for relevant stimuli, has been well documented. This study examined single neuron activities in the lateral PFC when monkeys covertly tracked one of randomly moving objects. Although many neurons responded to the target, we also found a group of neurons that exhibited a selective response to the distractor that was visually identical to the target. Because most neurons were insensitive to an additional distractor that explicitly differed in color from the target, the brain seemed to monitor the distractor only when necessary to maintain internal object segregation. Our results suggest that the lateral PFC might provide at least two top–down signals during covert object tracking: one for enhancement of visual processing for the target and the other for selective suppression of visual processing for the distractor. These signals might work together to discriminate objects, thereby regulating both the sensitivity and specificity of target choice during covert object tracking.

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