This suggests a strong feature

This suggests a strong feature Entinostat order tolerance in this area, which generalizes even beyond sensory input modality and early sensory experience, while maintaining the relative category selectivity implied by the term “visual word form area.” Moreover, this area shows remarkable adult plasticity, such that it can be recruited in an adult blind individual reading in a novel sensory modality after as little as 2 hr of training (Figure 4). After ∼70 hr of training in a group of subjects,

this area already displayed full category selectivity (Figure 2). These findings impact several of the major issues regarding the function and developmental origin of the VWFA, as well as the balance between plasticity and conserved cortical functions resulting from sensory deprivation. Specifically, they suggest that the VWFA performs a highly Selleckchem GDC-941 flexible task-specific reading-related operation that can be sensory modality independent (Reich

et al., 2012). We suggest that this operation is the learned link between letter shapes and their associated phonological content. This category and task selectivity is maintained in the congenital absence of vision, despite otherwise extreme plasticity for other functions and input types shown previously in the blind brain (see reviews in Frasnelli et al., 2011; Merabet and Pascual-Leone, 2010; Striem-Amit et al., 2011). This implies the presence of innately determined constraints (Striem-Amit et al., 2012a) on the emergence of VWFA selectivity for reading. Furthermore, in the context of visual rehabilitation, this study also shows that the recognition of many complex visual stimulus categories can be learned using SSDs, including detailed images of faces and houses (see Movies S1 and S2). We describe how such training was implemented on computer and in natural three-dimensional (3D) environments, details

of which may be of interest to those specializing in visual rehabilitation (see Supplemental Experimental Procedures). In the next sections, we address all these topics in more depth. In the visual modality, the VWFA has proved to be selective for letters over other complex visual stimuli such as drawings of objects, faces, much and houses (Cohen and Dehaene, 2004; Dehaene and Cohen, 2011; Dehaene et al., 2010; Hasson et al., 2002; Puce et al., 1996; Szwed et al., 2011; Tsapkini and Rapp, 2010), thus justifying its “visual word form area” label. Note that the VWFA, like other specialized ventral areas (Kanwisher, 2010), is also partially responsive to stimuli from nonpreferred categories and that its preference for alphabetic stimuli may be missed under some experimental conditions (reviewed in Price, 2012; Price and Devlin, 2011).

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