Free psychology seminar // Prof. Aliette Lochy

Meet us for another free psychology seminar!
It will take place on thursday, june 1, by 11am, at FPUL's room 7.

Event description:
Reading is a complex cognitive ability, acquired via instruction, for which our brain is not preprogrammed. In this seminar, professor Aliette will discuss current knowledge about the emergence of a specialized circuit for reading, presenting several studies in children and adults using a novel EEG approach in the domain of visual word processing.

With the Fast Periodic Visual Presentation (FPVS) approach, base stimuli (for instance, pseudofonts) are presented at a very fast rate (6Hz). Another category of stimuli (for instance, letter strings) appear every 5 items in these streams (1.2Hz). If they are discriminated from the base stimuli, specific brain responses will be observed at the predefined frequency of 1.2Hz (i.e., 6Hz/5).

Three main issues are addressed with this paradigm. First, in development, it is shown that in 5-year-old prereaders, letter strings already evoke a robust specific response over the left occipito-temporal cortex, which correlates with letter knowledge, while it was previously reported that at least one year of schooling is required for such a tuning.
Different teaching methods are also compared and seem to have an impact on the lateralization of brain responses to words. 

Second, in fluent readers, word-selectivity is examined in adults with scalp studies as well as with intracerebral recordings. 

Finally, the potential influence of learning to read on processing another visual category - like faces - is assessed with two experiments.