Cortical Activation during Reading Letter String in Normal and Reverse Directions: An fMRI Study.

In order to investigate the difference of cortical activation between reading letter string in normal direction and reverse direction, an fMRI study was conducted. In this study, the cortical activations responsible for Japanese string and Chinese string reading were investigated. The subjects performed normal direction reading task (read strings from left to right), and reverse direction reading task (read strings from right to left). According to the experimental results, the activated brain regions during normal direction reading task and reverse direction reading task were almost the same, besides, we found visuospatial transformation was involved in the reverse direction reading task, while this function was not significant during normal direction reading task.