Publications In Press
Bitan T & Booth JR (in press). Offline improvement in learning to read a novel orthography depends on direct letter instruction. Cognitive Science.
Improvement in performance after the end of the training session, termed Offline improvement, has been shown in procedural learning tasks. We examined whether offline improvement in learning a novel orthography depends on the type of reading instruction. 48 adults received multi-session training in reading nonsense words, written in an artificial script. Participants were trained in one of three conditions: alphabetical words preceded by direct letter instruction (Letter-Alph); alphabetical words with whole-word instruction (Word-Alph) and non-alphabetical (arbitrary) words with whole-word instruction (Word-Arb). Offline improvement was found only for the Letter-Alph group. Moreover , correlation with a standardized measure of word reading ability showed that good readers trained in the Letter-Alph group exhibit greater Offline-improvement, while good readers trained in the Word-Arb group showed greater Within-session-improvement during training. These results suggest that different consolidation processes and learning mechanisms were involved in each group. We argue that providing a short block of direct letter instruction prior to training resulted in increased involvement of procedural learning mechanisms during training.
Prado J, Chadha A & Booth JR (in press). The brain network for deductive reasoning: A quantitative meta-analysis of 28 neuroimaging studies. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.
Over the course of the past decade, contradictory claims have been made regarding the neural bases of deductive reasoning. Researchers have been puzzled by apparent inconsistencies in the literature. Some have even questioned the effectiveness of the methodology used to study the neural bases of deductive reasoning. However, the idea that neuroimaging findings are inconsistent is not based on any quantitative evidence. Here we report the results of a quantitative meta-analysis of 28 neuroimaging studies of deductive reasoning published between 1997 and 2010, combining 382 participants. Consistent areas of activations across studies were identified using the multilevel kernel density analysis (MKDA) method. We found that results from neuroimaging studies are far more consistent than what has been previously assumed. Overall, studies consistently report activations in specific regions of a left fronto-parietal system, as well as in the left basal ganglia. This brain system can be decomposed into three subsystems that are specific to particular types of deductive arguments: categorical, relational and propositional. These dissociations explain inconstancies in the literature. However, they are incompatible with the notion that deductive reasoning is supported by a single cognitive system relying either on visuo-spatial or rule-based syntactic mechanisms. Our findings provide critical insight into the cognitive organization of deductive reasoning and need to be accounted for by cognitive theories.
Li Y, Ding G, Booth JR, Huang R, Lv Y Zang Y, He Y & Peng D (in press). Sensitive period for white matter connectivity of superior temporal cortex in deaf people. Human Brain Mapping.
Previous studies have shown that white matter in the deaf brain changes due to hearing loss. However, how white matter development is influenced by early hearing experience of deaf people is still unknown. Using diffusion tensor imaging and tract-based spatial statistics, we compared white matter structures among three groups of subjects including 60 congenitally deaf individuals, 36 acquired deaf individuals and 38 sex- and age-matched hearing controls. The result showed that the deaf individuals had significantly reduced fractional anisotropy (FA) values in bilateral superior temporal cortex and the splenium of corpus callosum compared to hearing controls. The reduction of FA values in acquired deafness correlated with onset age of deafness, but not the duration of deafness. In order to explore the underlying mechanism of FA changes in the deaf groups, we further analyzed radial and axial diffusivities and found that (1) the reduced FA values in deaf individuals compared to hearing controls is primarily driven by higher radial diffusivity values and (2) in the acquired deaf, higher radial diffusivity was correlated with earlier onset age of deafness, but not the duration of deafness. These findings imply that early sensory experience is critical for growth of fiber myelination, and anatomical reorganization following auditory deprivation is sensitive to early plasticity in the brain.
Prado J, Mutreja R, Zhang H, Mehta R, Desroches AS, Minas J & Booth JR (in press). Distinct representations of subtraction and multiplication in the neural systems for numerosity and language. Human Brain Mapping.
It has been proposed that recent cultural inventions such as symbolic arithmetic recycle evolutionary older neural mechanisms. A central assumption of this hypothesis is that the degree to which a pre-existing mechanism is recycled depends upon the degree of similarity between its initial function and the novel task. To test this assumption, we investigated whether the brain region involved in magnitude comparison in the intraparietal sulcus (IPS), localized by a numerosity comparison task, is recruited to a greater degree by arithmetic problems that involve number comparison (single-digit subtractions) than by problems that involve retrieving facts from memory (single-digit multiplications). Our results confirmed that subtractions are associated with greater activity in the IPS than multiplications, whereas multiplications elicit greater activity than subtractions in regions involved in verbal processing including the middle temporal gyrus and inferior frontal gyrus that were localized by a phonological processing task. Pattern analyses further indicated that the neural mechanisms more active for subtraction than multiplication in the IPS overlap with those involved in numerosity comparison, and that the strength of this overlap predicts inter-individual performance in the subtraction task. These findings provide novel evidence that elementary arithmetic relies on the co-option of evolutionary older neural circuits.
