Top-down control in visual word recognition
In this talk, I will share some highlights of the scientific journey I have been on since graduating from NYU. They all concern what you are doing right now: transforming little black shapes into a stream of ideas that originated in my head and is now in yours. Reading is a task in which oculomotor control, selective attention, crowding, cortical plasticity and functional specificity are all extremely important (topics I learned to appreciate at NYU). My first finding was that word recognition is subject to severe processing capacity limits: so severe that (in many circumstances) you can recognize only one word at a time. These limits may arise in the visual word form area, a region in ventral occipito-temporal cortex that is critical for reading. Most of this talk will focus on fMRI studies investigating activity in this area. In addition to classic spatial attention effects, I have found large top-down modulations that seem to be uniquely related to engagement in a linguistic task and have not been observed in other visual areas. These studies are ongoing, and I am grateful for the opportunity to return to NYU and get your feedback.