Institute of Information Science, Academia Sinica

Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) has become one of the most used techniques in Cognitive Neuroscience. As a noninvasive and safe technique, fMRI measures and maps the brain activity of the neurons constantly fluctuating as a participant engages in different cognitive tasks, such as understanding language and reading. In this talk, I will first introduce the principles of fMRI and its analysis, followed by how fMRI can be applied to understand how the healthy brain works, and how that normal visual function is disrupted in diseases such as Chinese developmental dyslexia. I will show that developmental dyslexia may be associated with symmetry perception in the visual system. Impaired reading performance may result from failing to suppress symmetry perception during visual word form perception.