Neural differences of text and figure during representation and processing on human brain: An fMRI study

Both text and figure are important ways to represent data and information. Although many investigations on lexical, sentential representation and processing have been reported in cognitive neuroscience, the brain mechanism remains unclear on different neural substrates of representation and processing between text and figure. In our study, experimental materials were designed with the same content and meaning, but they were represented by either text or figure, which were two kinds of tasks, namely homogenous textual and graphic tasks. To address the differences of neural basis of representation and processing between text and figure, we scanned 36 subjects with fMRI using event-related design, as they read text or figure and then gave their own responses. The results showed that whether representation or processing, text was more significant activations of striate and prestriate cortex than figure, in contrast, figure was more significant activations of the parahippocampal gyrus and extrastriate than text.