Mask wearing increases eye involvement during smiling: a facial EMG study.

The use of face masks has become ubiquitous. Although mask wearing is a convenient way to reduce the spread of disease, it is important to know how the mask affects our communication via facial expression. For example, when we are wearing the mask and meet a friend, are our facial expressions different compared to when we are not? We investigated the effect of face mask wearing on facial expression, including the area around the eyes.

Dissociating the functions of superior and inferior parts of the left ventral occipito-temporal cortex during visual word and object processing.

During word and object recognition, extensive activation has consistently been observed in the left ventral occipito-temporal cortex (vOT), focused around the occipito-temporal sulcus (OTs). Previous studies have shown that there is a hierarchy of responses from posterior to anterior vOT regions (along the y-axis) that corresponds with increasing levels of recognition - from perceptual to semantic processing, respectively. In contrast, the functional differences between superior and inferior vOT responses (i.

Auditory-motor interactions for the production of native and non-native speech.

During speech production, auditory processing of self-generated speech is used to adjust subsequent articulations. The current study investigated how the proposed auditory-motor interactions are manifest at the neural level in native and non-native speakers of English who were overtly naming pictures of objects and reading their written names. Data were acquired with functional magnetic resonance imaging and analyzed with dynamic causal modeling.

Inter- and intrahemispheric connectivity differences when reading Japanese Kanji and Hiragana.

Unlike most languages that are written using a single script, Japanese uses multiple scripts including morphographic Kanji and syllabographic Hiragana and Katakana. Here, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging with dynamic causal modeling to investigate competing theories regarding the neural processing of Kanji and Hiragana during a visual lexical decision task. First, a bilateral model investigated interhemispheric connectivity between ventral occipito-temporal (vOT) cortex and Broca's area ("pars opercularis").

Dissociating visual form from lexical frequency using Japanese.

In Japanese, the same word can be written in either morphographic Kanji or syllabographic Hiragana and this provides a unique opportunity to disentangle a word's lexical frequency from the frequency of its visual form - an important distinction for understanding the neural information processing in regions engaged by reading. Behaviorally, participants responded more quickly to high than low frequency words and to visually familiar relative to less familiar words, independent of script. Critically, the imaging results showed that visual familiarity, as opposed to lexical frequency, had a strong effect on activation in ventral occipito-temporal cortex.

Improving the reliability of functional localizers.

A critical assumption underlying the practice of functional localization is that the voxels identified by functional localization are essentially the same as those activated in the main experiment for a particular anatomical area. Violations of this assumption bias the resulting analyses and can dramatically increase the likelihood of both Type I and Type II errors. Here we investigated how the amount of data affects the reliability of a set of common functionally-defined regions-of-interest (fROIs).

Top-down modulation of ventral occipito-temporal responses during visual word recognition.

Although interactivity is considered a fundamental principle of cognitive (and computational) models of reading, it has received far less attention in neural models of reading that instead focus on serial stages of feed-forward processing from visual input to orthographic processing to accessing the corresponding phonological and semantic information. In particular, the left ventral occipito-temporal (vOT) cortex is proposed to be the first stage where visual word recognition occurs prior to accessing nonvisual information such as semantics and phonology. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate whether there is evidence that activation in vOT is influenced top-down by the interaction of visual and nonvisual properties of the stimuli during visual word recognition tasks.

How does learning to read affect speech perception?

Behavioral studies have demonstrated that learning to read and write affects the processing of spoken language. The present study investigates the neural mechanism underlying the emergence of such orthographic effects during speech processing. Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) was used to tease apart two competing hypotheses that consider this orthographic influence to be either a consequence of a change in the nature of the phonological representations during literacy acquisition or a consequence of online coactivation of the orthographic and phonological representations during speech processing.