PDF(Pubmed)
Abstract：
Education sculpts specialized neural circuits for skills like reading that are critical to success in modern society but were not anticipated by the selective pressures of evolution. Does the emergence of brain regions that selectively process novel visual stimuli like words occur at the expense of cortical representations of other stimuli like faces and objects? \"Neuronal Recycling\" predicts that learning to read should enhance the response to words in ventral occipitotemporal cortex (VOTC) and decrease the response to other visual categories such as faces and objects. To test this hypothesis, and more broadly to understand the changes that are induced by the early stages of literacy instruction, we conducted a randomized controlled trial with pre-school children (five years of age). Children were randomly assigned to intervention programs focused on either reading skills or oral language skills and magnetoencephalography (MEG) data collected before and after the intervention was used to measure visual responses to images of text, faces, and objects. We found that being taught reading versus oral language skills induced different patterns of change in category-selective regions of visual cortex, but that there was not a clear tradeoff between the response to words versus other categories. Within a predefined region of VOTC corresponding to the visual word form area (VWFA) we found that the relative amplitude of responses to text, faces, and objects changed, but increases in the response to words were not linked to decreases in the response to faces or objects. How these changes play out over a longer timescale is still unknown but, based on these data, we can surmise that high-level visual cortex undergoes rapid changes as children enter school and begin establishing new skills like literacy.
摘要：
教育为诸如阅读之类的技能塑造了专门的神经回路，这些技能对现代社会的成功至关重要，但进化的选择性压力却没有预料到。选择性地处理诸如单词之类的新颖视觉刺激的大脑区域的出现是否以牺牲诸如面部和物体之类的其他刺激的皮层表示为代价？“神经元回收”预测，学习阅读应增强腹侧枕颞叶皮层（VOTC）中对单词的反应，并减少对面部和物体等其他视觉类别的反应。为了检验这个假设，更广泛地理解识字教学早期阶段引起的变化，我们对学龄前儿童(5岁)进行了一项随机对照试验.儿童被随机分配到干预计划，重点是阅读技能或口语技能，以及在干预之前和之后收集的脑磁图（MEG）数据用于测量对文本图像的视觉反应。面孔,和物体。我们发现，被教授阅读和口语技能会引起视觉皮层类别选择区域的不同变化模式，但是对单词的反应与其他类别之间没有明确的权衡。在对应于视觉字形式区(VWFA)的VOTC的预定义区域内,我们发现对文本的响应的相对幅度,面孔,和对象改变了，但是对单词的反应增加与对面部或物体的反应减少无关。这些变化如何在更长的时间范围内发挥作用仍然未知，但是，基于这些数据，我们可以推测，当孩子们进入学校并开始建立像识字这样的新技能时，高级视觉皮层会发生快速变化。
