The neural basis of Chinese, English and graphics cognition: An fMRI study of healthy Chinese subjects

With growing evidence from patient and neuroimaging studies, there are lots of differences between the neural mechanisms of Chinese and English cognition. Specifically, previous researches showed a clear correlation between the cognition of Chinese and graphics. The present study aimed to explore the similarity and difference of neural mechanism of Chinese, English and graphics during visual processing with functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI). The experimental materials adopted in the study were three kinds of representation icons representing the same object with different visual features, which refer to Chinese character, English word and line drawing of the same animal or plant, and a white attention dot with black background was used as control material. In the results, we demonstrated differential cortical representations of English cognition, Chinese characters cognition and graphics cognition.