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A Brain Scientist's Take on Writing
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- August 9, 2010
- 12:56 PM
- 1,064 views
Storytellers and How They Force Their Brainwaves on Their Audience
by Livia Blackburne in A Brain Scientist's Take on Writing
In a previous post, I suggested that writers were brain manipulators. Now I'm refining the description. It's more like a Vulcan mind meld.
A recent experiment by scientists at Princeton University shows neural coupling (coordinated brain activity) between a storyteller and a listener. The researchers used fMRI to scan a speaker’s brain as she told an unrehearsed story about an experience from high school. They then scanned 10 volunteers as they listened to a recording of the story.
The basic result was that listener brain activity trailed the speaker’s brain activity with a slight delay. Regions that process language and meaning showed a delay of around 1.5-3 seconds. This matches up with what you would expect during a conversation. The speaker thinks about something, says it, and the listener hears and understands it a few seconds later.
But it gets more interesting when you look more closely at delay times. Not all regions showed this delay – most notably, the low level brain regions that respond to sound. In both the speaker and the listener, these regions were time-locked to the sounds of the speaker’s words. This makes sense because the speaker doesn't hear the words any earlier than the listener does, so they process the sounds at the same time.
But here's the coolest result. Some regions in the listener's brain actually predicted the speaker's activity, as if the listener was anticipating parts of the story. Later tests of listener comprehension support this. The more predictive activity in a listener’s brain, the better she scored on comprehension questions after the experiment.
As usual, I try to draw some writing applications from these results. I have two thoughts.
First, it's a good reminder for writers that the story starts in your brain. Sure, the reader will add his own experiences and details, but you provide the raw materials. Have you ever had an experience where you got lazy and wrote a scene without a clear idea of what you were writing, only to have critique partners tell you that the descriptions were flat or the characters weren't believable? If your story is vague and dull in your imagination, your audience will also find it vague and dull.
Second, the correlations with listener comprehension and brain activation remind me that not all audience members are the same. Every book will have some readers that follow passively and other readers that engage and predict. Is it possible to write a story that satisfies both types of readers? What do you think?
Stephens GJ, Silbert LJ, & Hasson U (2010). Speaker-listener neural coupling underlies successful communication. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America PMID: 20660768
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Stephens GJ, Silbert LJ, & Hasson U. (2010) Speaker-listener neural coupling underlies successful communication. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. PMID: 20660768
- May 7, 2011
- 11:43 AM
- 1,064 views
Your Memory For Construction Workers Is Worse Than You Think (Unless You Are One)
by Livia Blackburne in A Brain Scientist's Take on Writing
I recently read Bamboo People by Mitali Perkins, an eye-opening novel about child soldiers in modern-day Burma. It tells the story of two boys from different ethnic groups: Chiko, a Burmese boy forced into the Army, and Tu Reh, a Karenni boy whose family is driven from their home by Burmese soldiers. When chance events throw the two together, Chiko and Tu Reh get to know each other not as faceless enemies, but as people.
There's quite a bit of social psychology research on group identity, in-groups, and out-groups, but this story actually brought to mind some vision science experiments on a phenomenon called change blindness. The basic idea is that we notice a lot less than we think we do. For example, watch this video from psychologist Dan Simons.
The man who picks up the phone is a different actor wearing different clothes, but people very rarely notice the switch. We’re less observant than we think.
But maybe we're less observant int his case because it's a video. Surely, people would notice changes in real life! And this is where we get another one of my favorite psychology experiments ever. It's explained in this video here.
In this experiment, psychologists posing as visitors to campus asked random pedestrians for directions. Halfway through the conversation, several people carrying a door forced their way between the speakers, and took advantage of the distraction to substitute a different person as the direction-asker. Surprisingly, about 50% of the pedestrians did not notice the change in conversation partner.
The psychologists noticed that pedestrians closer in age to the direction-askers were the most likely to notice the switch. They guessed that this was because people paid more attention to individuals in their own social group.
To test this hypothesis, they reran the experiment, but this time the direction-askers were dressed as construction workers. And as predicted, the percentage of pedestrians who noticed the change dropped dramatically. It seemed that pedestrians labeled the direction-askers as construction workers and didn't notice any details beyond that.
I find it fascinating that people automatically sort the people they meet into different groups and adjust the amount of attention they pay to them. It's an interesting question to ask when building your characters. What types of people would your character view as part of her social group, and what types of people would your character see without really seeing?
This week, I am also giving away a signed copy of Bamboo People by Mitali Perkins. There are two ways to enter the drawing.
1. Share this post on twitter and leave a comment with your twitter handle.
2. RSS subscribers will find a secret word at the end of this article. To enter the drawing, e-mail liviablackburne at gmail dot com with the secret word in the subject line.
I will draw a winner on Wednesday, May 11 2011.
Hope you enjoyed the post! To get regular updates on psychology and writing, use the subscribe option in the left sidebar.
Daniel J. Simons, & Daniel T. Levin (1998). Failure to detect changes to people during a real-world interaction PSYCHONOMIC BULLETIN & REVIEW
Bamboo People Giveaway Password: Karenni
" Writers in the audience should go purchase and read it forthwith." Dana Hunter review of From Words to Brain
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Daniel J. Simons, & Daniel T. Levin. (1998) Failure to detect changes to people during a real-world interaction. PSYCHONOMIC BULLETIN . info:/
- February 21, 2011
- 11:02 PM
- 1,040 views
Men Prefer Reading About Men, and So Do Women
by Livia Blackburne in A Brain Scientist's Take on Writing
Note: Congratulations to J. J. Brown for winning a copy of The Forest For the Trees. I will be contacting you for your mailing address. Also, I'm doing a Goodreads question and answer session on reading, writing, neuroscience, and psychology. If you're a Goodreads member, come on by. And finally, remember to submit entries for the guest post contest.
Would The Hunger Games have made it big if Katniss had been a boy? If Pride and Prejudice had been about five Bennett brothers and the proud (and wealthy) Miss Darcy, would readers still swoon? Keith from On Fiction recently covered a study that speaks to these questions.
The authors of the study wondered whether a protagonist’s gender affects the reading experience. They took passages from popular novels and presented them to readers either in the original form or with the protagonist’s gender switched. The researchers then had male and female readers read the text and answer questions evaluating the passage.
To give you an idea of what this is like, here is a sample paragraph from the experiment.
Original excerpt from The World Unseen:
Even lying on the roof, with only the cheap slates in her line of vision, she could tell that it was a police car. There was a carelessness in the skid of the tires over the sandy road, and in the way the handbrake was pulled up while the wheels were still turning, leaving a slight screech hanging in the heavy air. She stopped hammering, and peered over the edge of the ease. They had parked so close to the restaurant door that they had broken one of the flowerpots Jacob had planted only the day before.
"Bastards," she said, under her breath.
Modified excerpt:
Even lying on the roof, with only the cheap slates in his line of vision, he could tell that it was a police car. There was a carelessness in the skid of the tires over the sandy road, and in the way the handbrake was pulled up while the wheels were still turning, leaving a slight screech hanging in the heavy air. He stopped hammering, and peered over the edge of the ease. They had parked so close to the restaurant door that they had broken one of the flowerpots Jacob had planted only the day before.
"Bastards," he said, under his breath.
Did the passages read differently to you? Did one seem more interesting or more literary?
Turns out that both male and female readers both preferred male protagonists. They were more likely to agree with the sentences, "I feel I can understand and appreciate the main character and situation in the story" and "I would like to continue reading to find out what happens next in the story" when the main character was male.
Why would this be? Here are some random guesses:
1. The subjects in the study were from Western industrialized countries (Canada and Germany). While Western countries have made progress in gender equality, males still tend to be the dominant gender. Maybe this would be incentive for both men and women to identify better with the males.
2. Perhaps it had to do with whether the protagonists matched gender expectations. It's possible that in the passages used, the characters acted in a more stereotypically male way. The authors did note that two of the four original passages had confident, assertive women as protagonists (the other two passages started out with male progtagonists). Like it or not, confidence and assertiveness are often seen as masculine characteristics. It would be interesting to have readers rate the masculinity or femininity of the protagonists in these passages and see if that relates to whether they liked them.
3. The authors give a related explanation. It's rather complicated and I’m not quite sure I believe it, but the idea is this: People generally view men's actions as due to situational factors, while they view women's actions as due to personality or character. Since the fundamental attribution error says that we see ourselves as situationally motivated, we identify more with male characters.
All in all, this is an interesting result, and somewhat disturbing if it turns out to be true for books beyond the scope of this experiment. What are your thoughts?
Hope you enjoyed the post! To get regular updates from this blog, please use the subscribe options on the left sidebar.
Bortolussi, M., Dixon, P., & Sopčák, P. (2010). Gender and reading Poetics, 38 (3), 299-318 DOI: 10.1016/j.poetic.2010.03.004
"This is the sort of subject where all the answers give rise to more questions and this very readable book takes you through a lot of them in quite a short space" Steve Wales review of From Words to Brain
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Bortolussi, M., Dixon, P., & Sopčák, P. (2010) Gender and reading. Poetics, 38(3), 299-318. DOI: 10.1016/j.poetic.2010.03.004
- August 23, 2010
- 12:02 PM
- 985 views
How Language Affects Thought -- plus book giveaway!
by Livia Blackburne in A Brain Scientist's Take on Writing
I recently read Dreaming in Hindi, Katherine Russell Rich’s memoir of her year in India learning Hindi. Rich intersperses quirky anecdotes of learning and culture shock with scientific insights about learning a second language. I was excited see her mention two of my favorite studies on language and thought.
Psychologists and philosophers have long debated whether language shapes the way we think. While the most drastic viewpoint – that thought can’t exist without language -- has fallen out of favor, psychologists still study more subtle effects.
The first study has to do with gender in language. Many languages assign genders to words. For example, in Spanish, the word for “key” is feminine, while the German word for” key” is masculine. Gender for the most part is arbitrary and varies from language to language, which allows for some interesting experiments.
Psychologist Lera Boroditsky and colleagues asked Spanish and German speakers to provide descriptive adjectives for different objects. Interestingly, people produced adjectives that were consistent with gender stereotypes. For example, German speakers described keys as hard, heavy, jagged, metal, and useful, while Spanish speakers described them as golden, intricate, little, lovely, and shiny. For the word “bridge,” which is feminine in German and masculine in Spanish, the opposite happened. Germans described bridges as beautiful, elegant, fragile, and peaceful, while Spanish speakers said they were big, dangerous, long, and strong.
(Methodological note: the masculinity or femininity of adjectives was determined by a separate group of English speakers, blind to the study’s purpose, who rated these adjectives on masculinity and femininity. It's kind of amusing to see which words received which rating.)
In a second experiment, Boroditsky looked at language and the conception of time. English speakers primarily speak of time in horizontal terms. For example, we talk about moving meetings forward, or pushing deadlines back. Mandarin speakers, on the other hand, use up/down metaphors as well. So a Mandarin speaker would refer to the previous week as “up week” and next week as “down week.”
Boroditsky performed an experiment to see whether priming people to think either vertically or horizontally would affect their ability to think about time. Participants first answered a question about horizontally or vertically placed objects. For example, they saw two worms in a row and had to say whether the black worm was in front. Or they’d see two vertically stacked balls and say whether the black ball was above the white ball. Then the participants answered a question about time (“ Does March come before April”, etc.).
They found that English speakers were quicker to answer questions about time after answering horizontal spatial questions, while Mandarin speakers were quicker after vertical spatial questions. This reminds me of the scaffolded mind idea, in which concrete experiences provide a way to understand abstract concepts.
What do these studies say to me as a writer? It's interesting to see how subtle aspects of language affect the way we think. It argues for thinking like poets and valuing each word were not just a dictionary meaning, but all the other layers of associations and meanings that come with it. I don’t think it’s worth obsessively wondering about subconscious associations, but it’s certainly something interesting to think about.
Dreaming in Hindi was given to me as a review copy, and I would now like to pass it onto one of you. If you would like to enter the drawing, there are two ways you can do it. Either:
1. Retweet this post and paste the link in the comments or
2) 2. If you're an RSS subscriber, there is a secret code on the bottom of this entry. Send an e-mail to liviablackburne [at] gmail.com with a secret code as the SUBJECT LINE.
I will draw a winner next Monday.
Boroditsky, L. (2001). Does Language Shape Thought?: Mandarin and English Speakers' Conceptions of Time Cognitive Psychology, 43 (1), 1-22 DOI: 10.1006/cogp.2001.0748
Dreaming in Hindi Giveaway Code: Udiapur
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Boroditsky, L. (2001) Does Language Shape Thought?: Mandarin and English Speakers' Conceptions of Time. Cognitive Psychology, 43(1), 1-22. DOI: 10.1006/cogp.2001.0748
- November 4, 2010
- 11:27 AM
- 888 views
Erotic Romance, Condoms, and Social Responsibility
by Livia Blackburne in A Brain Scientist's Take on Writing
Hey folks. Sorry for the sporadic posting lately. My writing time for the last two months has been tied up on a sekrit project. In true graduate student fashion, I attacked the project with some top sekrit procrastination, and things got pretty hectic towards the end. But that should be wrapping up soon.
But enough about me. Let's talk about something more interesting. Like erotic romance novels. And condoms. And of course, science.
Raymond Moore at On Fiction recently described a study about the influence of romance novels on condom use. Erotic romance as a genre generally focuses on spontaneous and passionate sex. Since rubbers don’t exactly scream passion, love scenes rarely mention their use.
Researchers at Northwestern University were interested in how novels affected attitudes toward condom use in readers. They surveyed college students about their reading habits and found that students who read more romance novels had more negative attitudes towards condom use and less intention to use condoms.
But correlation does not necessarily equal causation. To prove that romance novels actually influence condom behavior, you need a controlled experiment. And here’s where we get to one of the more amusing psychology experiments in recent history.
Participants were recruited to come into the lab and read once a week for three weeks. One group of participants read unedited romance novel excerpts. For example, here's an actual excerpt used in the study.
He touched, hardly touching at all, and left her weak. His mouth, gliding like a cool breeze over her flesh, was rapture… When she sighed, he brought his lips back to hers.
He undressed her slowly, bringing the gown down inch by inch, wallowing in the delight of warming the newly bared skin. Fascinated with each Trevor he brought her, he lingered. Then he took her gently over the first crest.
Don't you feel for the poor research assistant who had to read through romance novels looking for these passages? It's a hard job, but somebody's got to do it. (No pun intended. Get your mind out of the gutter.)
In the safe sex condition, participants read the same thing, except that a paragraph about condom use was added. For example, the following paragraph was inserted between the previous two.
He pulled back slightly so he can look at her. “Should we use protection?” He asked gently. She nodded at him, her face warm, as he unwrapped the bright foil. Pleased with his concern for her, she smiled at him and kissed his throat.
So what did the scientists find? After just three sessions of reading, participants in the safe sex condition had more positive attitudes about condoms. The safe sex participants also expressed marginally more intention to use condoms in the future.
So that's an amusing study. But now let's step back now and think little more seriously. The study suggests that what people read has some measurable effect on their behavior and lifestyle.
Here’s a question then. What, if any, obligation does an author have to avoid promoting dangerous or self-destructive habits in their fiction? Now this question applies to all authors, but I’m particularly interested in what authors who write for young adults have to say, since those readers are probably the most active in building their worldviews. And I'm not just thinking about condoms. What about other themes, like violence, destructive relationships, etc.?
Discussions about morality in fiction usually go in the direction of, “Readers can tell when they're being preached to and it makes for bad stories.” Most can agree that hitting readers over the head with a moral is not the way to go, but I’m asking about more subtle influences. What actions and situations do we present as sexy? What do we present as boring? And is this complicated by the fact that self-destructive/unsafe behaviors often make for the most exciting stories?
I don't have a good answer either way, but I would like to hear your thoughts. What social responsibility do we have as writers? Or do you think we only responsible to our muses?
Diekman, A., McDonald, M., & Gardner, W. (2000). LOVE MEANS NEVER HAVING TO BE CAREFUL. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 24 (2), 179-188 DOI: 10.1111/j.1471-6402.2000.tb00199.x
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Diekman, A., McDonald, M., & Gardner, W. (2000) LOVE MEANS NEVER HAVING TO BE CAREFUL. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 24(2), 179-188. DOI: 10.1111/j.1471-6402.2000.tb00199.x
- July 31, 2010
- 04:37 PM
- 836 views
The Power of Touch
by Livia Blackburne in A Brain Scientist's Take on Writing
Touch imagery has always been a useful storytelling tool. Even when we're not putting together a lyrical masterpiece, it sneaks into our language. We talk about warm smiles, slippery personalities, getting caught between a rock and a hard place.
As it turns out, touch imagery might be more than just a product of an overactive metaphor engine. It may have something to do with the underlying way our brain structures our thoughts. Psychologists sometimes call it the scaffolded mind hypothesis. It's the idea that sensory and motor experiences provide a type of scaffold for us to conceptualize more abstract ideas. For example, the physical warmth associated with affectionate touch later becomes a way to think about interpersonal warmth.
Several clever experiments demonstrate this. There is evidence that the same brain region (the insula) is used to process both physical and psychological warmth. There's also evidence that mere exposure to warmer objects will affect our judgment.
In one study done by Lawrence Williams and John Bargh from the University of Colorado, participants were casually asked to hold either a warm cup of coffee or an iced coffee. After that, they were given a profile of a hypothetical Person A and asked to rate his personality on several traits. People holding the warm cup of coffee rated person A as having warmer personality traits.
In a second study, participants were either given a hot or cold pack. Those given the hot pack were more likely to choose a gift certificate for a friend over a Snapple beverage for themselves as payment for the study.
The scaffolding hypothesis applies more to just warmth. A study by Ackerman and colleagues from MIT found similar results along other dimensions. Among their findings:
1. Study participants holding heavier clipboards rated job candidates as better overall and displaying more serious interest in the position. However, participants didn’t rate the job candidates as socially more likable (presumably because likeability is not associated with hardness).
2. Study participants with heavier clipboards allocated more money to social issues when considering government funding. (Interestingly, only men showed this effect. Women funded social issues to close to the maximum amount for both clipboard conditions.)
3. Participants who completed a puzzle with sandpaper-covered pieces rated a social interaction as more adversarial than participants who completed a puzzle with smooth pieces.
4. People who sat in hard chairs were tougher negotiators when pretending to bargain for a car than those who sat in soft chairs.
Pretty cool huh? Are you taking advantage of these associations in your writing? What kind of touch imagery can you invoke for a more atmospheric story, stronger characters, or more intense emotion?
Williams, L., & Bargh, J. (2008). Experiencing Physical Warmth Promotes Interpersonal Warmth Science, 322 (5901), 606-607 DOI: 10.1126/science.1162548
Ackerman, J., Nocera, C., & Bargh, J. (2010). Incidental Haptic Sensations Influence Social Judgments and Decisions Science, 328 (5986), 1712-1715 DOI: 10.1126/science.1189993
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Williams, L., & Bargh, J. (2008) Experiencing Physical Warmth Promotes Interpersonal Warmth. Science, 322(5901), 606-607. DOI: 10.1126/science.1162548
Ackerman, J., Nocera, C., & Bargh, J. (2010) Incidental Haptic Sensations Influence Social Judgments and Decisions. Science, 328(5986), 1712-1715. DOI: 10.1126/science.1189993
- March 22, 2011
- 11:34 PM
- 765 views
Why Justin Timberlake Should Avoid Transitive Verbs
by Livia Blackburne in A Brain Scientist's Take on Writing
As writers, we're always trying to find words that perfectly capture our meaning. "I broke the cookie jar" has a different feel than "The cookie jar broke." But does it really matter? Would the average reader really notice the difference? A recent study suggests that subtle wording changes can have real psychological effects.
Psychologist from Stanford University were interested in the distinction between agentive (a.k.a. transitive) or nonagentive (a.k.a. nontransitive) verbs. For example, in the example above, my role in the cookie jar mishap is emphasized in the agentive version ("I broke the cookie jar") while it is completely ignored in the nonagentive ("The cookie jar broke") version. So how much does wording matter?
The researchers wrote two versions of a report describing a restaurant fire. One used agentive verbs, while the other version used nonagentive verbs. Here's the actual passage used:
Agentive version:
Mrs. Smith and her friends were finishing a lovely dinner at their favorite restaurant. After they settled the bill, they decided to head to a nearby café for coffee and dessert. Mrs. Smith followed her friends and she stood up, she flopped her napkin on the centerpiece candle. She had ignited the napkin! As Mrs. Smith reached to grab the napkin, she toppled the candle and ignited the whole tablecloth too! As she jumped back, she overturned the table and ignited the carpet, as well. Hearing her desperate cries, the restaurant staff hurried over and heroically managed to put the fire out before anyone got hurt.
Nonagentive version:
Mrs. Smith and her friends were finishing a lovely dinner at their favorite restaurant. After they settled the bill, they decided to head to a nearby café for coffee and dessert. Mrs. Smith followed her friends and she stood up, her napkin flopped on the centerpiece candle. The napkin had ignited! As Mrs. Smith reached to grab the napkin, the candle toppled and the whole tablecloth ignited too! As she jumped back, the table overturned and the carpet ignited, as well. Hearing her desperate cries, the restaurant staff hurried over and heroically managed to put the fire out before anyone got hurt.
Participants got either one version or the other and had to answer questions regarding how much Mrs. Smith should be blamed and how much she should pay the restaurant for damages. And here's the interesting part. Participants who got the agentive version thought that Mrs. Smith should pay $935.17 on average. This is $247 more than the amount assigned by the participants who read the non-agentive version ($688.75)
This is interesting, but how far can you push it? The paragraph in this experiment was the only source of information participants had about the restaurant fire. Would language be as important if participants had other sources of information?
To answer this question, the experimenters took advantage of the infamous wardrobe malfunction between Justin Timberlake and Janet Jackson at the 2004 Super Bowl (yeah, remember that?). For those of you unfamiliar with the event, you can watch it here.
In this second experiment, participants watched the video and read a description of the event (the order of the video and written description were counterbalanced between subjects). The description was either transitive "In the final dance move, he unfastened a snap and tore part of the bodice! He slid the cover right off Jackson's chest!", or non-transitive “In this final dance move, a snap unfastened and part of the bodice tore! The cover slid right off Jackson's chest!"
Even though participants watched the video, language still had an effect on perceived blame, increasing both the rating of Timberlake's fault in the event and the amount of money participants thought he should be fined.
So writers, use your verbs carefully, and make sure you're saying exactly what you mean.
Hope you enjoyed the post! To receive regular updates from the blog, use one of the subscription options in the left column.
Fausey CM, & Boroditsky L (2010). Subtle linguistic cues influence perceived blame and financial liability. Psychonomic bulletin & review, 17 (5), 644-50 PMID: 21037161
"The reader begins to understand how his own experiences color the black-and-white text laid out before him." Gloria McGee review of From Words to Brain
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Fausey CM, & Boroditsky L. (2010) Subtle linguistic cues influence perceived blame and financial liability. Psychonomic bulletin , 17(5), 644-50. PMID: 21037161
- January 28, 2010
- 07:51 PM
- 752 views
Dyslexia Brain Differences Show Up Before Formal Reading Instruction
by Livia in Reading and Word Recognition Research
Last time, we talked about early behavioral differences between prereading children that predicted future reading impairment. Today, we’re continuing on the theme of early predictive differences, this time in the brain.
The question of how early brain differences arise is a worthwhile one. We want to know whether the dyslexic brain is tackling reading differently from the very beginning or if these brain differences arise after some reading experience, perhaps reflecting compensatory strategies that the children may have developed.
Specht and colleagues (Scandinavian Journal of Psychology 2008) conducted a brain imaging study on Norwegian children (a good population to study because reading instruction starts in second grade in Norway). The basic goal of their experiment was to scan 6 year olds (before they learned to read) and see if they process words differently depending on their risk for dyslexia. Unlike the Lervag study, this study was not longitudinal. Specht and colleagues determined which kids were at risk for dyslexia using a risk index that took into account factors like heredity, language development, and other factors.
Kids looked at four kinds of stimuli during an fmri scan: pictures, logos, regular words and irregular words while performing a categorization task (“Is this something you can play with?” and similar questions). I won’t spend too much time comparing between conditions because I’m not clear on what characteristics were controlled for between the stimulus types.
There were differences between the at-risk and normal reading group in all conditions. There were several interesting findings. First, risk index score correlated with increased activation when looking at words in the angular gyrus, an area that has been reported to be involved in language/phonological processing.
Our old friend, the visual word form area, also shows up. At a more liberal statistical threshold ( p... Read more »
Specht K, Hugdahl K, Ofte S, Nygård M, Bjørnerud A, Plante E, & Helland T. (2009) Brain activation on pre-reading tasks reveals at-risk status for dyslexia in 6-year-old children. Scandinavian journal of psychology, 50(1), 79-91. PMID: 18826418
- May 14, 2010
- 03:30 PM
- 750 views
Developmental Changes in Word Processing After Adolescence
by Livia in Reading and Word Recognition Research
When does brain development for reading stop? We often focus on school aged children, but what about the later teen years? To answer this question, Brem and colleagues tested adolescents (age 15-17) and adults (19-31) in a study using fMRI and...
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Brem S, Bucher K, Halder P, Summers P, Dietrich T, Martin E, & Brandeis D. (2006) Evidence for developmental changes in the visual word processing network beyond adolescence. NeuroImage, 29(3), 822-37. PMID: 16257546
- February 11, 2010
- 10:58 AM
- 748 views
Is Dyslexia a Visual or Phonological Deficit?
by Livia in Reading and Word Recognition Research
It's interesting how the public's impression of dyslexia differs from the impressions of researchers in the field. I recently read an article by Vidyasagar and Pammer arguing that dyslexia is a visual deficit. To the general public, this claim seems obvious because most people believe that people with dyslexia see things backwards.
Many dyslexia researchers, however, will find this claim
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Vidyasagar, T., & Pammer, K. (2010) Dyslexia: a deficit in visuo-spatial attention, not in phonological processing. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 14(2), 57-63. DOI: 10.1016/j.tics.2009.12.003
- March 31, 2010
- 05:13 PM
- 733 views
Dyslexic vs. Nonimpaired Readers: Differences in Brain Development
by Livia in Reading and Word Recognition Research
Accessibility:Intermediate/Advanced
Studies comparing normal reading and dyslexic children often take a snapshot approach, comparing brain function at specific ages. However, these studies don’t tell us how these differences fit into the developmental picture. Are dyslexics following the same developmental course as normal readers, just at a different rate? Or do dyslexic brains develop in a
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Shaywitz BA, Skudlarski P, Holahan JM, Marchione KE, Constable RT, Fulbright RK, Zelterman D, Lacadie C, & Shaywitz SE. (2007) Age-related changes in reading systems of dyslexic children. Annals of neurology, 61(4), 363-70. PMID: 17444510
- March 8, 2010
- 10:42 PM
- 711 views
Brain Change Patterns in Developing Children
by Livia in Reading and Word Recognition Research
Accessibility Level: Intermediate-Advanced
What changes in the brain as children mature? Are there patterns in the way the changes occur? Do some regions mature more quickly than others?
Last time, we talked about a paper by Schlaggar et al that examined brain differences between children and adults during a word generation task. A study published in Cerebral Cortex by Brown and colleagues
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Brown, T. (2004) Developmental Changes in Human Cerebral Functional Organization for Word Generation. Cerebral Cortex, 15(3), 275-290. DOI: 10.1093/cercor/bhh129
- December 21, 2010
- 01:39 PM
- 698 views
What Mirror Images and Foreign Scripts Tell Us About the Reading Brain
by Livia Blackburne in A Brain Scientist's Take on Writing
Here’s a simple exercise. Count the number of times the letter ‘A’ appears in the sentences below. Easy enough, but, there's a catch. You have to do it without reading the words.
Ready?
One day, after Little Red Riding hood woke up, mother called her into the kitchen and handed her a basket of cakes and pastries. “Take these to grandmother. She's sick, and perhaps these cakes will make her feel better.”
If you have been reading for years, you probably found it difficult, if not impossible, to keep yourself from reading. You may have kept yourself from understanding the sentence, but odds are, you probably understood some of the words. When I try to do it, I have to blur my vision because if any letters come into focus, I automatically decode their meaning. For most adults in literate countries, reading is so well practiced that it’s reflexive. If the words are there, it's impossible not to read.
Now think about this for a minute. Here we have a completely artificial task. It’s not part of our biology – humans aren’t born with an innate reading reflex. If you raise a child on a desert island, he'll learn to eat, walk, and sleep, but odds are he won't spontaneously pick up a stick and start writing. For most of human history, written language didn't even exist. Reading as a cultural invention has only been around for a few thousand years, a snap of a finger in evolutionary terms. We have not, and will not within any of our lifetimes, evolve a genetic program for reading. Yet our brains are so adept at this skill that it becomes as reflexive as seeing itself.
That we are able to become so skilled at reading is a testament to the flexibility and plasticity of our brains. Of course, we don't start from scratch. We already have fine tuned machinery for similar tasks – we’re very good at seeing, and the trick is just to retune that machinery to the demands of reading. These demands are multiple. On one hand there’s the mapping from sound to symbol, and getting our visual and language systems to work together. But even on a basic visual level, we have to somewhat reprogram our visual systems.
For example, imagine a horse. Now in your head, imagine that the horse is standing in front of a mirror, and you're looking at its reflection. What does it look like now? Of course, it still looks like a horse. Mirror invariance, the idea that something flipped sideways is still the same object, is a core property of our visual systems, and for good reason. Imagine how confusing it would be if every time we saw something from the opposite direction, it became something different. But now, imagine the lowercase letter b. What's the mirror image of b? Now it's a completely different letter: d. In most writing systems, left-right orientation matters. When a character is flipped, we see it as something else.
So what happens when you take a brain used to making mirror generalizations and teach it to read? Any parents of school-age children could tell you. When you're first learning, you make lots of mistakes. Mirror reversal is overwhelmingly common in beginning writers, from the occasional flipped letter to whole words written as a mirror image. Kids do this spontaneously. They never actually see flipped letters in the world around them. It's as if their brains are too powerful for the task. They generalize letters to other orientations because that's what they've done with every single other object they've seen. You have to learn to recognize a letter only in a certain orientation .
With practice however, we do retrain our brains to read, and as you saw when we did the letter counting exercise, we become quite good at it. With such an ingrained skill, it makes you wonder if you can see its footprints in the brain. Does the brain of a reader look different from that of a nonreader?
To answer this question, we must first step back and see how our brain’s visual regions are organized. Much of the research in this area has been conducted by Nancy Kanwisher, a psychologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her primary tool is fMRI, an imaging technology that allows neuroscientists to measure blood flow in the brain as people perform tasks. Since blood flow is tied to brain activity, fMRI allows us to see the patches of brain involved in different tasks. Kanwisher’s experiments often involve participants looking at different categories of images. By looking for areas that respond more to one category than another, she can find brain regions specialized in dealing with a certain image type. Using this technique, Kanwisher has found many specialized regions: a face area, a place area, and even an area that responds preferentially to body parts. It makes sense that these areas would exist. As a species, our survival has long depended on our ability to recognize and process faces, places, and body parts, so it's not surprising that we would have developed brain regions specialized for those things.
But what about words? Would they have their own region? A few years ago, Chris Baker, a researcher in Kanwisher’s lab, conducted the same type of experiment to look for a word region. Baker scanned native English speakers while they looked at different types of images, including words, line drawings, and Hebrew letters. They found that most participants did indeed have a brain region that responded more to words than objects.
This is rather remarkable, that the brain would develop a specialized area for an artificial category of images. But to fully interpret the results, we need more proof that this region developed as a result of learning to read. It could be that the region is there simply by coincidence, that the area is responding to some visual characteristic of print words regardless of whether a person is literate or not. To follow up, Baker tested monolingual English readers and bilingual English/Hebrew readers on the same experiment. If reading experience does alter the brain, you would expect English readers and English/Hebrew readers to have different brain responses to Hebrew. And this is indeed what Baker found. The bilingual readers had high activation for both Hebrew and English in their word region, while monolingual English readers only had high activation for English. Experience with a written language does indeed shape the brain’s response to that language.
Note from Livia: The above passage is an excerpt from my essay From Words to Brain, which follows the reading process from the moment a reader sees words on a page, through understanding the story and ultimately extracting meaning. If you know anyone who's interested in this topic, please do pass the excerpt along to them. :-)
The essay is available from:
Amazon (kindle)
Amazon UK (kindle)
Smashwords (various electronic formats, including epub and printable pdf)
Bookrepublic (Italian translation, epub)
Baker CI, Liu J, Wald LL, Kwong KK, Benner T, & Kanwisher N (2007). Visual word processing and experiential origins of functional selectivity in human extrastriate cortex. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 104 (21), 9087-92 PMID: 17502592
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Baker CI, Liu J, Wald LL, Kwong KK, Benner T, & Kanwisher N. (2007) Visual word processing and experiential origins of functional selectivity in human extrastriate cortex. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 104(21), 9087-92. PMID: 17502592
- April 29, 2010
- 08:32 PM
- 668 views
Letter-sound Training in Children Causes Brain Specialization for Letters
by Livia in Reading and Word Recognition Research
My research focuses on the left occipitotemporal region. One area in this region, also commonly referred to as the visual word form area, has been shown to activate selectively for letters. Presumably, since reading is too recent a phenomenon to have...
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Brem S, Bach S, Kucian K, Guttorm TK, Martin E, Lyytinen H, Brandeis D, & Richardson U. (2010) Brain sensitivity to print emerges when children learn letter-speech sound correspondences. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. PMID: 20395549
- March 3, 2010
- 06:24 PM
- 657 views
Comparing Child and Adult Brains: How to Account for Performance Differences?
by Livia in Reading and Word Recognition Research
In an ideal world, we’d be able to study maturational brain changes by scanning a group of adults, a group of children, and comparing the brain images. Unfortunately, there are complications.
One complication is that these studies usually require doing some kind of task in the scanner, and children usually have lower accuracy and longer reaction times on this task. These differences,
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Schlaggar BL, Brown TT, Lugar HM, Visscher KM, Miezin FM, & Petersen SE. (2002) Functional neuroanatomical differences between adults and school-age children in the processing of single words. Science (New York, N.Y.), 296(5572), 1476-9. PMID: 12029136
Casey, B. (2002) NEUROSCIENCE: Windows into the Human Brain. Science, 296(5572), 1408-1409. DOI: 10.1126/science.1072684
- April 8, 2011
- 11:10 AM
- 650 views
The N1 Component in Prereading Children
by Livia in Reading and Word Recognition Research
Accessibility: Intermediate-Advanced
Just to recap from the last article, the N170 is an ERP component that differentiates between words and symbol strings in normal reading adults. This the specialization developed after learning to read, or does it have something to do with the visual properties of symbols?
Maurer and colleagues tested pre-reading kindergartners to see whether the specialization is there before they learn to read. They had kids perform the same task as adults (looking at a series of words, pseudowords, symbol strings, and pictures).
They found several things:
1. Adults again had the same N170 (called N1 in this paper), which was stronger for words than symbols.
2. Kids also had an N1, but it was later, had a larger amplitude, and most importantly, did not distinguish between words and symbols, suggesting that this N1 specialization stems from experience with words.
3. Some of the kids, the ones with high letter knowledge, did have an N1 that differentiated between letters and symbols. However, the pattern was different from adults. While adults had the strongest effect on the left side of the brain, these children showed an effect on the right side.
So in conclusion, the N1 specialization seems to be related to reading. However, there seem to be some intermediate steps in the development of the specialization. At least in an early stage, the right hemisphere is involved, and then the processing becomes more left lateralized.
Maurer U, Brem S, Bucher K, & Brandeis D (2005). Emerging neurophysiological specialization for letter strings. Journal of cognitive neuroscience, 17 (10), 1532-52 PMID: 16269095
What is it that transforms a page full of words into an experience that moves us and leaves us changed? K. Okada From Words to Brain
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Maurer U, Brem S, Bucher K, & Brandeis D. (2005) Emerging neurophysiological specialization for letter strings. Journal of cognitive neuroscience, 17(10), 1532-52. PMID: 16269095
- April 15, 2010
- 12:07 PM
- 640 views
Phonological Training Changes Brain Activation in Dyslexic Children
by Livia in Reading and Word Recognition Research
Note: Online Universities has included me in their list of top 50 female science bloggers. It’s not actually for this blog, but for my Brain Science and Creative Writing blog. Anyways, check out the list if you get a chance. There are lot of interesting bloggers.
Accessibility: Intermediate-Advanced
We’ve looked at the neuroscience of dyslexia and how the dyslexic brain processes words.
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Shaywitz BA, Shaywitz SE, Blachman BA, Pugh KR, Fulbright RK, Skudlarski P, Mencl WE, Constable RT, Holahan JM, Marchione KE.... (2004) Development of left occipitotemporal systems for skilled reading in children after a phonologically- based intervention. Biological psychiatry, 55(9), 926-33. PMID: 15110736
- March 15, 2010
- 01:04 PM
- 631 views
Dyslexia and Brain Connectivity: Insights from Periventricular Nodular Heterotopia
by Livia in Reading and Word Recognition Research
Accessibility Level: Intermediate
One theory of dyslexia is that it stems from abnormal brain connectivity -- that faulty connections between different language areas result in reading difficulty. Now, some evidence from another condition offers some support for this theory.
Periventricular nodular heterotopia (PNH) is a neurological condition in which neurons don’t migrate to the correct
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Chang, B., Katzir, T., Liu, T., Corriveau, K., Barzillai, M., Apse, K., Bodell, A., Hackney, D., Alsop, D., Wong, S.... (2007) A structural basis for reading fluency: White matter defects in a genetic brain malformation. Neurology, 69(23), 2146-2154. DOI: 10.1212/01.wnl.0000286365.41070.54
- April 7, 2011
- 03:13 PM
- 616 views
Introduction to the N170 Response to Words
by Livia in Reading and Word Recognition Research
Accessibility: Intermediate-Advanced
This month is N170 month. I'm going to be going through a bunch of papers by Urs Maurer on the N170 ERP component and how it relates to word processing. EEG is not my specialty, so hopefully I won't mess anything up.
For this post, we'll start with the basics. The N170 is an ERP component measured in EEG experiments. The N means that it is a negative potential, and the 170 means that it peaks roughly at around 170 ms, although the timing can vary. The N170 tends to be elicited by certain categories of visual images (like faces), and is enhanced for categories for which the subject has some expertise (for example, enhanced N170 response for bird experts when viewing birds).
This last characteristic makes the N170 helpful for studying word processing. Urs Maurer and colleagues tested adults by showing them words, pseudowords, and symbol strings*. The adults showed a greater N170 to words than symbol strings, which would be consistent with an expertise for words acquired over years of reading. The N170 was also more left lateralized for words than to symbol strings, which is not surprising given the general left lateralization of language. Also, the N170 seems to be stronger over the inferior occipital temporal channels, close to the visual word form area.
So those are the basics for the N170 in normal reading adults. It's a useful tool for studying word processing in populations like children and people with dyslexia, so that is where we will continue.
*the task was to detect repetitions
Maurer U, Brandeis D, & McCandliss BD (2005). Fast, visual specialization for reading in English revealed by the topography of the N170 ERP response. Behavioral and brain functions : BBF, 1 PMID: 16091138
What is it that transforms a page full of words into an experience that moves us and leaves us changed? K. Okada From Words to Brain
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Maurer U, Brandeis D, & McCandliss BD. (2005) Fast, visual specialization for reading in English revealed by the topography of the N170 ERP response. Behavioral and brain functions : BBF, 13. PMID: 16091138
- July 8, 2010
- 06:28 PM
- 610 views
fMRI of Letter Processing in Children and Adults
by Livia in Reading and Word Recognition Research
Accessibility: Intermediate-Advanced
How is letter processing different from word processing? Since letters compose words, many reading models have letter processing earlier in the reading stream, but there is still room for more imaging...
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Turkeltaub PE, Flowers DL, Lyon LG, & Eden GF. (2008) Development of ventral stream representations for single letters. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 13-29. PMID: 19076386
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