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Neural Correlates of Visuospatial Working Memory and Chinese Reading: An fMRI Study
Poster Session D, Saturday, September 13, 5:00 - 6:30 pm, Field House
This poster is part of the Sandbox Series.
Wenxiyuan Deng1, Chun Yin Liu2, Tian Jiang3, Lingbin Bian3, Nizhuan Wang3, Kofi Yakpo1, Wai Ting Siok3; 1The University of Hong Kong, 2University of Western Ontario, 3The Hong Kong Polytechnic University
Baddeley’s working memory (WM) model emphasizes the importance of maintaining and manipulating verbal, visual, and spatial information in complex cognitive tasks such as reading (Baddeley, 2003). In alphabetic writing systems, reading relies heavily on the phonological loop as the letters are mapped onto phonemes. However, reading the Chinese logographic script requires a more precise visuospatial analysis of strokes, radicals, and structural configurations during reading, where visuospatial WM plays a crucial role (Kim, 2022; Yang et al., 2021). Although prior research has examined visual processing skills such as visual discrimination (Yang & Meng, 2020) and visual search (Liu et al., 2015), as well as the interaction between visual processing and verbal WM (Liu et al., 2024), the specific role of visuospatial WM in Chinese reading remains underexplored. This study aims to investigate the relationship between visuospatial WM and Chinese reading by employing fMRI to examine their neural correlates. Thirty-six healthy native Chinese speakers (Mean age = 21.2, 15 females and 21 males) underwent fMRI scanning while performing an orthographic task and two visuospatial WM tasks (block and digit). In the orthographic task, participants compared and determined whether the two Chinese characters shared the same components. The study employed two visuospatial WM task designs featuring both memory (passive storage) and manipulation (active visuospatial transformation) conditions, allowing direct comparison between basic and complex visuospatial WM processes. The first, simple design asked participants to view the checkerboard patterns and either memorize them for subsequent recognition or mentally transform them by rotation or flipping, testing basic visuospatial storage and manipulation without verbal processing. The second, more complex design replaced shaded blocks with digits of varying sizes, requiring simultaneous memory for digit identity (verbal processing), size (visual processing), and spatial location. This three-feature task additionally captured the multi-dimensional processing characteristic of real-world cognitive tasks like logographic character recognition by engaging verbal, visual, and spatial systems. Preliminary results reveal that all tasks robustly activate the bilateral frontoparietal network, including the inferior parietal lobule and the middle frontal gyrus/inferior frontal junction. The manipulation condition additionally engages the mental rotation network, notably the dorsal caudate and the cerebellum. The block-visuospatial task elicits stronger activation in visual-motor integration areas (including the superior occipital gyrus, inferior temporal gyrus, and precentral gyrus) compared to the digit-visuospatial task. Activation overlapping between the block-manipulation and the orthographic tasks is evident, despite the orthographic task showing enhanced extra-cortical activation, suggesting the complexity of orthographic processing. The left fusiform gyrus is activated exclusively in the digit-manipulation and the orthographic tasks, suggesting its role in the mental representation of visually presented verbal materials (Dietz et al., 2005; Zhao et al., 2017). Ongoing analyses employ a novel Bayesian method for characterizing community structure-based latent brain states (Bian et al., 2021). Neural metrics such as mutual information will be correlated with behavioral measures of Chinese reading to functionally characterize the community-based brain dynamics. Overall, the study holds significant potential to advance understanding of the visuospatial WM network dynamics and Chinese reading.
Topic Areas: Reading, Control, Selection, and Executive Processes