Notably, in left inferior frontal language regions, activation differences between reading material and nonreading material were identified only without the cluster-level correction.
Specifically, statistical power was large enough to identify reliable differences between reading material and nonreading material on the whole-brain level using thresholds corrected for multiple comparisons.
The rationale behind this task was that we wanted to ensure comparable processing demands for reading material and nonreading material, as well as for words and pseudowords with as little top-down influence as possible.
The use of an implicit reading task, which did not demand excessive phonological or lexical processing of the words and pseudowords, may have been responsible for the weak left IFG difference between reading material and nonreading material in the present study.
Before applying the approach to natural reading (i.e., in the context of sentences), we provided the proof of concept that analysis of fMRI responses from self-paced fixations is sensitive enough to identify activation differences between reading material and nonreading material.
