06.09.2024 New Publication: Both mOTS-words and pOTS-words prefer emoji stimuli over text stimuli during a lexical judgment task
Our latest research, a collaboration between the Stanford Vision and Perception Neuroscience Lab and the AE Educational Neuroscience of the Phillips-Universität Marburg, published in Cerebral Cortex, provides fresh insights into the function of OTS-words, a brain region crucial for reading. Through fMRI experiments, we investigated how different parts of OTS-words process compound words, comparing traditional text with emojis.
Our research surprisingly revealed that OTS-words, traditionally associated with text processing, actively engages with emojis, and its activation is influenced by the cognitive effort of reading. This challenges the prevailing view, highlighting OTS-words' broader role in assigning meaning to visual symbols and lets us reconsider how our brain connects visual symbols to semantic meaning.