How does literacy break mirror invariance in the visual system?

Literacy breaks mirror invariance for visual stimuli: a behavioral study with adult illiterates.

The ability to recognize 2 mirror images as the same picture across left-right inversions exists early on in humans and other primates. In order to learn to read, however, one must discriminate the left-right orientation of letters and distinguish, for instance, b from d. We therefore reasoned that literacy may entail a loss of mirror invariance. To evaluate this hypothesis, we asked adult lite...

The Effect of Different Break Activities on Eye-Hand Coordination in Female Students

People face breaks in their daily tasks that effect on their daily life. The present study was designed to evaluate the effect of different break activities on eye-hand coordination in female students. In the current experimental study conducted with repeated measures design, 36 high school female students with age range 13-15 years old were conveniently selected. In order to evaluate participa...

Journal of Experimental Psychology: General Literacy Breaks Mirror Invariance for Visual Stimuli: A Behavioral Study With Adult Illiterates

Breaking the symmetry: Mirror discrimination for single letters but not for pictures in the Visual Word Form Area

Humans and primates can quickly recognize mirror images of previously exposed pictures. This spontaneous mirror invariance, though advantageous for visual recognition, makes it difficult to distinguish the orientation of letters (e.g. to differentiate a "b" from a "d"), and may result in classical mirror reading and writing errors in preschoolers. Mirror invariance must therefore be overcome du...

Hierarchical processing of face viewpoint in human visual cortex.

The ability to recognize objects across different viewpoints (view invariance) is a remarkable property of the primate visual system. According to a prominent theory, view information is represented by view-selective mechanisms at early stages of visual processing and gradually becomes view invariant in high-level visual areas. Single-cell recording studies have also reported an intermediate st...