Spatiotemporal analysis of neuromagnetic activation associated with mirror reading

Our previous report has confirmed that visually presented words can elicit neuromagnetic activities from the visual cortex, angular gyrus and Broca's area. It is not clear how the words are visuospatially transformed and recognized by the human brain. Mirror reading is characterized by reading which runs in the opposite direction to normal reading, with reversals of letters. It would be very interesting to find out if there are any neuromagnetic differences between the mirror reading and normal reading. Four right-handed healthy adults have been studied with a whole cortex Magnetoencephalography (MEG) system. The stimuli consisted of eight normal oriented words and eight inverted exclamation mark section "reversed words" (mirror-image of the words). All stimuli were randomly presented on the screen in front of the subjects using DirectX. MEG data were analyzed using both single dipole modeling and synthetic aperture magnetometry (SAM). Four responses to the reversed words were identified in all four subjects. In comparison to the normally oriented words, the reversed words elicited a stronger response at a latency of 248+/-6 ms. SAM results indicated that the reversed words invoked strong activations in the left and right parietal cortices but the normally oriented words did not. The mirror reading elicited one magnetic response which is different from that of the normal reading. The difference between the mirror reading and the normal reading in terms of neuromagnetic activation may reflect the development of novel representations for reversed words.