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Cortical control of eye movements in natural reading: Evidence from MVPA

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Abstract

Language comprehension during reading requires fine-grained management of saccadic eye movements. A critical question, therefore, is how the brain controls eye movements in reading. Neural correlates of simple eye movements have been found in multiple cortical regions, but little is known about how this network operates in reading. To investigate this question in the present study, participants were presented with normal text, pseudo-word text, and consonant string text in a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner with eyetracking. Participants read naturally in the normal text condition and moved their eyes “as if they were reading” in the other conditions. Multi-voxel pattern analysis was used to analyze the fMRI signal in the oculomotor network. We found that activation patterns in a subset of network regions differentiated between stimulus types. These results suggest that the oculomotor network reflects more than simple saccade generation and are consistent with the hypothesis that specific network areas interface with cognitive systems.

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Notes

  1. Univariate analysis was also completed on the ROIs and showed significant differences in overall activation between normal reading, pseudo-text reading, and consonant string reading in rlFEF, and SEF.

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Acknowledgements

Research reported in this publication was supported by the National Institute on Aging of the National Institutes of Health under award number R56AG053346. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Center for Mind and Brain, University of California, 267 Cousteau Place, Davis, CA, 95618, USA

    Jessica E. Goold & John M. Henderson

  2. Liberal Arts and Sciences, GIST, 123 Cheomdan-gwagiro, Buk-gu, Gwangju, 61005, Republic of Korea

    Wonil Choi

  3. Department of Psychology, University of California, 1 Shields Ave, Davis, CA, 95616, USA

    John M. Henderson

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  1. Jessica E. Goold
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  2. Wonil Choi
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  3. John M. Henderson
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Correspondence to Jessica E. Goold.

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Goold, J.E., Choi, W. & Henderson, J.M. Cortical control of eye movements in natural reading: Evidence from MVPA. Exp Brain Res 237, 3099–3107 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-019-05655-3

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