Passive reactivation of background information from long-term memory during reading

The present study examined the nature of background information activation in text reading with a moving-window technique, previously used in behavioral studies. We compared brain activation evoked by a locally coherent target sentence that was either consistent, qualified (conflict-then-consistent) or inconsistent with some background information in long-term memory. With a significantly longer reading time of the target sentence, the inconsistent condition showed greater brain activation in several cortical regions than did the consistent and the qualified conditions. Neither reading time nor brain activations showed any differences between the consistent and the qualified conditions. The results indicate that processing of a sentence in text reading involves passive reactivation of updated background information stored in long-term memory, consistent with proposal from a 'here-and-now' theory.