Image: Brain pathways for mirror discrimination learning during literacy acquisition

Description: Brain pathways for mirror discrimination learning during literacy acquisition. Upper: The Visual Word Form Area [VWFA] (in red) presents mirror invariance before alphabetization and mirror discrimination for letters after alphabetization. A key aspect of alphabetization is to set in place the audio-visual mapping known as “phoneme-grapheme correspondence,” whereby elementary sounds of language (i.e., phonemes) are linked to visual representations of them (i.e., graphemes) (Frith, 1986). Lower: During alphabetization, the VWFA can receive top-down inputs with discriminative information from phonological, gestural (handwriting) and speech production areas and bottom-up inputs from lower level visual areas. All these inputs can help the VWFA to discriminate between mirror representations, thus correctly identifying letters to enable a fluent reading.
Title: Brain pathways for mirror discrimination learning during literacy acquisition
Credit: Pegado F, Nakamura K and Hannagan T (2014) How does literacy break mirror invariance in the visual system? Front. Psychol. 5:703. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00703 http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00703/full
Author: Pegado F, Nakamura K and Hannagan T
Usage Terms: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0
License: CC BY 3.0
License Link: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0
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