Researchers investigate cognitive brain mechanism devoted to reading
Letters, syllables, words and sentences spatially arranged sets of symbols that acquire meaning when we read them. But is there an area and cognitive mechanism in our brain that is specifically devoted to reading? Probably not; written language is too much of a recent invention for the brain to have developed structures specifically dedicated to it.
According to this novel paper published in
Current Biology, underlying reading there is evolutionarily ancient function that is more generally used to process many other visual stimuli. To prove it, SISSA researchers subjected volunteers to a series of experiments in which they were shown different symbols and images.
E-Mail
Letters, syllables, words and sentences spatially arranged sets of symbols that acquire meaning when we read them. But is there an area and cognitive mechanism in our brain that is specifically devoted to reading? Probably not; written language is too much of a recent invention for the brain to have developed structures specifically dedicated to it.
According to this novel paper published in
Current Biology, underlying reading there is evolutionarily ancient function that is more generally used to process many other visual stimuli. To prove it, SISSA researchers subjected volunteers to a series of experiments in which they were shown different symbols and images. Some were very similar to words, others were very much unlike reading material, like nonsensical three-dimensional tripods, or entirely abstract visual gratings; the results showed no difference between the way participants learned to recognise novel stimuli across these three domains. According to the scholars