讲座题目：How learning to read changes mind and brain
讲座学者：Dr. Falk Huettig ，
Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, Netherlands
主 持 人： Dr. Esther Pascual
讲座时间：2017年11月7日下午2:30~4:30
讲座地点：紫金港校区东五201会议室
Abstract：
Reading as a recent cultural invention has not been shaped by evolutionary processes and thus must make use of cognitive systems and cortical networks which are either domain-general or have evolved for other purposes (cf. Dehaene& Cohen, 2007). Research on the effect of literacy thus is a powerful tool to investigate how cultural inventions impact on cognition and brain functioning. During my talk I will draw on evidence from behavioural experiments and neurobiological studies.
I will present the results of a series of studies in which we found that illiterates, children, and people with dyslexia show similar language prediction deficits, with evidence consistent with the notion that this at least partly reflects their common reduced reading exposure rather than a causal impairment due to a reading disorder. I will also show that that (il)literacy has important consequences for the cognitive ability of selecting relevant information from a visual display of non-linguistic material. I will present two experiments which show that learning to read results in an extension of the functional visual field from the fovea to parafoveal areas, combined with some asymmetry in scan pattern influenced by the reading direction, both of which also influence other (e.g. non-linguistic) tasks such as visual search.
In a first longitudinal study with completely illiterate participants, we measured brain responses to speech, text, and other categories of visual stimuli with fMRI before and after a group of illiterate participants in India completed a literacy training program in which they learned to read and write Devanagari script.A literate and an illiterate no-training control group were matched to the training group in terms of socioeconomic background and were recruited from the same societal community in two villages of a rural area near Lucknow, India. This design permitted investigating effects of literacy cross-sectionally across groups before training (N=86) as well as longitudinally (training group N=25). Literacy effects were specific to written text and (to a lesser extent) to false fonts, but contrary to previous research, we found no direct evidence of literacy affecting the processing of other types of visual stimuli such as faces, tools, houses, and checkerboards.Another major difference to some previous studies is that we did not find any evidence for effects of literacy on the processing of spoken language in our Hindi-speaking participants.
Using resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging we observed that literacy-induced neuroplasticity is not confined to the cortex but increases the functional connectivity between the occipital lobe and subcortical areas in the midbrain and the thalamus. Individual rates of connectivity increase were significantly related to the individual decoding skill gains. Overall these findings crucially complement current neurobiological concepts of normal and impaired literacy acquisition.
Falk Huettig is Senior Investigator at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, Netherlands where he heads the Cultural Brain group. He obtained his PhD in psychology from the University of York (UK). He has been a visiting professor at the University of Hyderabad and at Jawaharlal Nehru University New Delhi (India). He is the editor in chief of the Journal of Cultural Cognitive Science and has edited special issues for ActaPsychologica,Journal of Memory and Language, and Language, Cognition and Neuroscience. His main interests are the effects of cultural inventions, literacy, dyslexia, multimodal input, and prediction on the human mind and brain.
外语学院
2017年10月31日
