Overview: This study uses the reading system and what is known about the orchaestration of sevral neural systems that support fluent reading. The paper start with a discussion of the differen sensory and cognitive control systems that are involved in reading and the porcesses that they map onto. The authors also weave in a discussion of memory encoding and discuss how subsequent retrieval is shaped by encoding and discussing that remembered vs. forgotten words tend to have different neural patterns at time of encoding including in some left frontal cortex areas. The study is set up to test for differences in neural activity in children in the reading systems during encoding of words that were subsequently remembered or not. While they are testing the reading system the focus of the study seems to be memory encoding resources.
Methods: Participants - 33 children aged 8-12 who were typical readers, native English speakers. Final sample is 27 participants. Measures - TONI test of non-verbal intellgence, TOWRE, WJIII LWID and Word attack, Ctopp, TOSREC. Imaging Task - Event related word reading task, participants were instructed to read words one at a time and remmeber them. Words were high frequency. After the scan participants underwent a recognition test where they were presented with 37 old and 22 new words and asked to circle the old ones. %hits was calculated as well as accuracy which was the ration of %hits to %false alarms. Reading measure were correlated with task performance. Imaging protocol- 9 minutes task, 2 sec TR, 32 channel coil, 40 slices MRI processing - pretty standard preprocessing, two models, checkerboard vs. words and forgotten vs. remembered items (based on memory test). Regions from main effect maps were chosen and then specific comparisons were done within those regions. Regions were then put onto the Power network brain.
Results: Participants measures an average of 63% of words. Task performance was related to LWID but no other measures. Regions during encoding that showed greater activity in bilateral visual regions and left cognitive control system regions and right cerebellum. The authors argue that the recruitment of bi-lateral visual regions is related to that system still developing in children while the cognitive control recrtuiment is looking adult-like
Thoughts: This paper seems to have trouble really honing in on reading or memory. One big questions is, this is obviously a memory task - is it also a word reading task? I mean obviously there is word reading going on, but the effortful remembering component seems to seperate this from studies that the authors discuss in the begining as showing cognitive control engagement in reading. That is, does the memory process not totally color just the ‘reading’.