http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0010945215001069
- Under a Creative Commons license
Open Access
Abstract
Competitive
Scrabble players devote considerable time to studying words and
practicing Scrabble-related skills (e.g., anagramming). This training is
associated with extraordinary performance in lexical decision, the
standard visual word recognition task (Hargreaves, Pexman, Zdrazilova
& Sargious, 2012). In the present study we investigated the neural
consequences of this lexical expertise. Using both event-related and
resting-state fMRI, we compared brain activity and connectivity in 12
competitive Scrabble experts with 12 matched non-expert controls.
Results showed that when engaged in the lexical decision task (LDT),
Scrabble experts made use of brain regions not generally associated with
meaning retrieval in visual word recognition, but rather those
associated with working memory and visual perception. The analysis of
resting-state data also showed group differences, such that a different
network of brain regions was associated with higher levels of
Scrabble-related skill in experts than in controls.