Brain Activities Related to the Chinese Character Chunking Tasks: An fMRI Study

Chunking is a unifying information-processing mechanism in human cognition and plays an important role in problem solving. In the present experiment, we use a Chinese character chunking task to explore the neural basis of the goal-oriented chunking, which were classified into loose chunking and tight chunking. The behavioral result confirmed our prediction that the tight chunking was more difficult than the loose chunking. For the imaging result, we observed similar neural activations in the occipital, parietal and frontal lobule in both conditions, which may reflect the visual perception, visuo-spatial and executive processing in the manipulation of Chinese chunks; by direct contrast the tight chunking and loose chunking, we found stronger activation in bilateral cuneus and we suggested that it may be resulted from the more mental operation of visual mental manipulation needed in the tight chunking.