Functional MRI Study on Perceiving Orthographic Structure and Simplified Semantic Pictures

The different perceiving patterns of each picture, alphabetic words and Chinese characters, were widely investigated psychophysically. The more precise localisation can be done in terms of brain activity using functional image technique such as PET and fMRI recently. Until now, there was no fMRI study to make direct comparison between perception of single Chinese character and simplified pictures (pictograph). We have made direct comparison of these two components using modern magnetic resonance techniques. We cannot confirm the right hemispheric dominance for perception of single Chinese character and pictographs. These two kinds of perceiving pattern can be underlying different mechanism.