Neural substrates of word and number categorization

Project C10 will evaluate how the brain supports word and number categorization, by further characterizing regions in the ventral visual stream that respond preferentially to each of these stimuli. We will i) elucidate if and how neural responses in word and number regions are impacted by the task the participants are performing, ii) investigate recent reports that number regions are challenging to identify across studies and provide a reliable fMRI localizer to overcome these challenges, iii) evaluate the emergence of number regions during childhood education and model this process in convolutional neural networks. By providing a better characterization of word and number regions, we will generate insight on visual categorization, as well as learning-induced changes in the brain. Moreover, as word and number regions in the ventral visual stream have been implicated in dyslexia and dyscalculia, the current project may facilitate future clinical work on these disorders.