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Updated: Jun 4, 2025

Lexical Decision Task for Studying Written Word Recognition in Adults with and without Dementia or Mild Cognitive Impairment
Published on: June 25, 2019
Aging of visual word perception is related to decreased segregation within and beyond the word network in the brain
Licheng Xue1, Tianying Qing2, Yating Lv3,4
1School of Early Childhood Education, Hangzhou Polytechnic, Zhejiang, China.
Introduction:
We investigated the neural correlates of cognitive decline in visual word perception from the perspective of intrinsic brain networks.
Methods:
A total of 19 healthy older adults and 22 young adults were recruited to participate in two functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) sessions (one resting-state session and one for localizer tasks), along with a visual word perceptual processing task. We examined age-related alterations in resting-state functional connectivity (FC) within the word network, as well as between the word network and other networks. We tested their associations with behavioral performance in word and symbol-form processing.
Results:
We found that, compared to young adults, older adults exhibited increased FC between the two word-selective regions in the left and right ventral occipitotemporal cortex (vOT). Additionally, older adults exhibited increased FC between these two word-selective regions and non-word-selective regions. Notably, these FC alterations correlated with individual differences in behavioral performance in visual word perception.
Discussion:
These results suggest that cognitive decline in visual word perception is associated with decreased segregation within and beyond the word network in the aging brain. Our findings support the neural dedifferentiation hypothesis for cognitive decline in visual word processing and improve our understanding of interactive neural specialization theory.
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