Reference
Stanislas Dehaene
The account of mirror invariance, and of what learning to read has to undo, is largely his.
Dehaene's work on reading describes a visual system that treats an object and its mirror image as the same thing. That is a sensible default for almost everything you will ever look at: a dog facing left is the same dog facing right, and a system that filed those separately would double its work for nothing.
Writing breaks the rule. In the Latin alphabet b and d are mirror images that mean different things, and so are p and q. Dehaene's argument, part of what he calls neuronal recycling, is that literacy repurposes a piece of visual cortex that evolved for object recognition, and that part of learning to read is teaching it to stop generalising across reflections in this one narrow case. It is why mirror-reversal errors are ordinary in early readers rather than a sign of anything, and it is the same default that makes a reflected figure in a rotation task so hard to reject.
Referenced work
- Reading in the Brain (2009) reference
- Neuronal recycling hypothesis (the framework behind it) reference
Elsewhere
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