Let's face it: reading acquisition, face and word processing

摘要

The invention of writing is one of the most important cultural changes of mankind. Notably, because reading was invented only 5000 years ago, there was not sufficient time to evolve a brain system devoted to visual word recognition. Nevertheless, learning to read leads to the development of a strong response to written materials in the left fusiform gyrus, in the “visual word form area” (VWFA, e.g., Dehaene, 2009). Consequently, reading must rely on pre-existing neural systems for vision and language, which may be partially “recycled” for the specific problems posed by reading (Dehaene, 2005; Dehaene and Cohen, 2007). This consistent localization is related to prior properties of the corresponding tissue, which make it particularly suitable to the specific problems posed by the invariant visual recognition of written words (Dehaene, 2009): bias for foveal stimuli (Hasson et al., 2002), posterior-to-anterior increase in perceptual invariance (Grill-Spector et al., 1998; Lerner et al., 2001), and more direct projection fibers to language areas (Cohen et al., 2000; Epelbaum et al., 2008).