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      The rise and fall of rapid occipito-temporal sensitivity to letters: Transient specialization through elementary school

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          Abstract

          Letters, foundational units of alphabetic writing systems, are quintessential to human culture. The ability to read, indispensable to perform in today’s society, necessitates a reorganization of visual cortex for fast letter recognition, but the developmental course of this process has not yet been characterized. Here, we show the emergence of visual sensitivity to letters across five electroencephalography measurements from kindergarten and throughout elementary school and relate this development to emerging reading skills. We examined the visual N1, the electrophysiological correlate of ventral occipito-temporal cortex activation in 65 children at varying familial risk for dyslexia. N1 letter sensitivity emerged in first grade, when letter sound knowledge gains were most pronounced and decayed shortly after when letter knowledge is consolidated, showing an inverted U-shaped development. This trajectory can be interpreted within an interactive framework that underscores the influence of top-down predictions. While the N1 amplitudes to letters correlated with letter sound knowledge at the beginning of learning, no association between the early N1 letter response and later reading skills was found. In summary, the current findings provide an important reference point for our neuroscientific understanding of learning trajectories and the process of visual specialization during skill learning.

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          Controlling the False Discovery Rate: A Practical and Powerful Approach to Multiple Testing

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            The free-energy principle: a unified brain theory?

            A free-energy principle has been proposed recently that accounts for action, perception and learning. This Review looks at some key brain theories in the biological (for example, neural Darwinism) and physical (for example, information theory and optimal control theory) sciences from the free-energy perspective. Crucially, one key theme runs through each of these theories - optimization. Furthermore, if we look closely at what is optimized, the same quantity keeps emerging, namely value (expected reward, expected utility) or its complement, surprise (prediction error, expected cost). This is the quantity that is optimized under the free-energy principle, which suggests that several global brain theories might be unified within a free-energy framework.
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              The visual word form area: expertise for reading in the fusiform gyrus.

              Brain imaging studies reliably localize a region of visual cortex that is especially responsive to visual words. This brain specialization is essential to rapid reading ability because it enhances perception of words by becoming specifically tuned to recurring properties of a writing system. The origin of this specialization poses a challenge for evolutionary accounts involving innate mechanisms for functional brain organization. We propose an alternative account, based on studies of other forms of visual expertise (i.e. bird and car experts) that lead to functional reorganization. We argue that the interplay between the unique demands of word reading and the structural constraints of the visual system lead to the emergence of the Visual Word Form Area.
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                Author and article information

                Contributors
                Journal
                Dev Cogn Neurosci
                Dev Cogn Neurosci
                Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience
                Elsevier
                1878-9293
                1878-9307
                11 May 2021
                June 2021
                11 May 2021
                : 49
                : 100958
                Affiliations
                [a ]Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, Psychiatric Hospital, University of Zurich, Switzerland
                [b ]Neuroscience Center Zurich, University of Zurich and ETH Zurich, Switzerland
                [c ]MR-Center of the Department of Psychiatry, Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics and the Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, Psychiatric Hospital, University of Zurich, Switzerland
                [d ]Center for Interdisciplinary Brain Sciences Research, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, CA, USA
                Author notes
                [* ]Corresponding author at: Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, University Hospital of Psychiatry, University of Zurich, Neumünsterallee 9, 8032, Zurich, Switzerland. silvia.brem@ 123456uzh.ch
                Article
                S1878-9293(21)00049-9 100958
                10.1016/j.dcn.2021.100958
                8141525
                34010761
                6bf8ab7a-8777-4a24-b3cd-e549f7c6c559
                © 2021 The Author(s)

                This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).

                History
                : 20 July 2020
                : 26 April 2021
                : 2 May 2021
                Categories
                Original Research

                Neurosciences
                erp,visual n1,letter processing,development,familial risk for dyslexia
                Neurosciences
                erp, visual n1, letter processing, development, familial risk for dyslexia

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