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Recruitment of the ventral and dorsal streams in statistical graph comprehension: An fMRI study

Issue title: Papers from the 3rd International Conference on Biomedical Engineering and Technology (iCBEB 2014), 25–28 September 2014, Beijing, China

Subtitle:

Guest editors: Edward J. Ciaccio

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Li, Mia; b; c | Lu, Shengfua; b; c; * | Zhong, Ninga; b; c; d

Affiliations: [a] The International WIC Institute, Beijing University of Technology, Beijing, China | [b] The Beijing International Collaboration Base on Brain Informatics and Wisdom Services, Beijing, China | [c] The Beijing Key Laboratory of MRI and Brain Informatics, Beijing, China | [d] The Department of Life Science and Informatics, Maebashi Institute of Technology, Maebashi-City Maebashi, Japan

Correspondence: [*] Corresponding author: Shengfu Lu, The International WIC Institute, Beijing University of Technology, Ping Le Yuan 100, Chaoyang District, Beijing 100124, China. Tel.: +86 10 6739 6464; Fax: +86 10 6739 6295; E-mail:lusf@bjut.edu.cn

Keywords: fMRI, statistical graph, statistical graph with text, ventral stream, dorsal stream

DOI: 10.3233/THC-150998

Journal: Technology and Health Care, vol. 23, no. s2, pp. S593-S601, 2015

Published: 2015
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Abstract

BACKGROUND: Although many previous studies have focused on statistical graph comprehension in cognitive psychology, there is no consensus among them.

OBJECTIVE: Brain neuroimaging studies on the statistical graph comprehension are useful to account for the cognitive mechanism of interpreting statistical graphic information.

METHODS: The present study used two experimental conditions, a statistical graph (SG) and a statistical graph with text (SGT), and one control condition, a text (ST), where the ST task was a verbal description of the information from the SG, and when the SGT is a mixed graph + textual description. We used fMRI to investigate the brain activity of 36 normal subjects while they passively viewed the statistical information presented in visual forms as SG, ST or SGT.

RESULTS: The results showed that compared with the control tasks, both SG and SGT consistently activated ventral and dorsal streams and that compared with SGT, SG significantly activated the ventral stream but not the dorsal stream.

CONCLUSIONS: These results suggest that the portions of the ventral and dorsal streams related to object recognition are commonly involved in statistical graph comprehension. These findings provide neuroimaging evidence for the cognitive processing of statistical graphs.

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