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      The Interactive Account of ventral occipitotemporal contributions to reading

      review-article
      1 , 2
      Trends in Cognitive Sciences
      Elsevier Science

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          Abstract

          The ventral occipitotemporal cortex (vOT) is involved in the perception of visually presented objects and written words. The Interactive Account of vOT function is based on the premise that perception involves the synthesis of bottom-up sensory input with top-down predictions that are generated automatically from prior experience. We propose that vOT integrates visuospatial features abstracted from sensory inputs with higher level associations such as speech sounds, actions and meanings. In this context, specialization for orthography emerges from regional interactions without assuming that vOT is selectively tuned to orthographic features. We discuss how the Interactive Account explains left vOT responses during normal reading and developmental dyslexia; and how it accounts for the behavioural consequences of left vOT damage.

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          A free energy principle for the brain.

          By formulating Helmholtz's ideas about perception, in terms of modern-day theories, one arrives at a model of perceptual inference and learning that can explain a remarkable range of neurobiological facts: using constructs from statistical physics, the problems of inferring the causes of sensory input and learning the causal structure of their generation can be resolved using exactly the same principles. Furthermore, inference and learning can proceed in a biologically plausible fashion. The ensuing scheme rests on Empirical Bayes and hierarchical models of how sensory input is caused. The use of hierarchical models enables the brain to construct prior expectations in a dynamic and context-sensitive fashion. This scheme provides a principled way to understand many aspects of cortical organisation and responses. In this paper, we show these perceptual processes are just one aspect of emergent behaviours of systems that conform to a free energy principle. The free energy considered here measures the difference between the probability distribution of environmental quantities that act on the system and an arbitrary distribution encoded by its configuration. The system can minimise free energy by changing its configuration to affect the way it samples the environment or change the distribution it encodes. These changes correspond to action and perception respectively and lead to an adaptive exchange with the environment that is characteristic of biological systems. This treatment assumes that the system's state and structure encode an implicit and probabilistic model of the environment. We will look at the models entailed by the brain and how minimisation of its free energy can explain its dynamics and structure.
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            The Helmholtz machine.

            Discovering the structure inherent in a set of patterns is a fundamental aim of statistical inference or learning. One fruitful approach is to build a parameterized stochastic generative model, independent draws from which are likely to produce the patterns. For all but the simplest generative models, each pattern can be generated in exponentially many ways. It is thus intractable to adjust the parameters to maximize the probability of the observed patterns. We describe a way of finessing this combinatorial explosion by maximizing an easily computed lower bound on the probability of the observations. Our method can be viewed as a form of hierarchical self-supervised learning that may relate to the function of bottom-up and top-down cortical processing pathways.
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              How learning to read changes the cortical networks for vision and language.

              Does literacy improve brain function? Does it also entail losses? Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we measured brain responses to spoken and written language, visual faces, houses, tools, and checkers in adults of variable literacy (10 were illiterate, 22 became literate as adults, and 31 were literate in childhood). As literacy enhanced the left fusiform activation evoked by writing, it induced a small competition with faces at this location, but also broadly enhanced visual responses in fusiform and occipital cortex, extending to area V1. Literacy also enhanced phonological activation to speech in the planum temporale and afforded a top-down activation of orthography from spoken inputs. Most changes occurred even when literacy was acquired in adulthood, emphasizing that both childhood and adult education can profoundly refine cortical organization.
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                Author and article information

                Contributors
                Journal
                Trends Cogn Sci
                Trends Cogn. Sci. (Regul. Ed.)
                Trends in Cognitive Sciences
                Elsevier Science
                1364-6613
                1879-307X
                June 2011
                June 2011
                : 15
                : 6
                : 246-253
                Affiliations
                [1 ]Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuro-imaging, University College London, London WC1N 3BG, UK
                [2 ]Cognitive, Perceptual and Brain Sciences, Division of Psychology and Language Sciences, University of London, London WC1E 6BT, UK
                Article
                TICS957
                10.1016/j.tics.2011.04.001
                3223525
                21549634
                c321cb0d-24e6-44fa-8314-cb564ca4ae4d
                © 2011 Elsevier Ltd.

                This document may be redistributed and reused, subject to certain conditions.

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                Neurosciences
                Neurosciences

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