Literacy dominates Western society to the extent that we are largely unaware of its presence and influence. Yet it is increasingly important for information behaviours to address the needs of non-literate people as the technologies of literate cultures seek to consolidate their grip on the developing world. Literacy is now undergoing its greatest changes since the last 500 years with technology...

In most brain computer interface (BCI) systems, some target users have significant difficulty in using BCI systems. Such target users are called 'BCI-illiterate'. This phenomenon has been poorly investigated, and a clear understanding of the BCI-illiteracy mechanism or a solution to this problem has not been reported to date. In this study, we sought to demonstrate the neurophysiological differ...

As literate English speakers, we are accustomed to the idea that words are made up of individual consonant and vowel sounds, called segments, that these sounds group into larger units called syllables, and that syllables naturally break down into intermediate units that include the rhyme (rime). But are elements like the segment, syllable, and rime universal, i.e., appropriate for the descripti...

This study addresses the question of whether any facial expressions of emotion are universal. Recent studies showing that members of literate cultures associated the same emotion concepts with the same facial behaviors could not demonstrate that at least some facial expressions of emotion are universal; the cultures compared had all been exposed to some of the same mass media presentations of f...

The objectives of this article are to characterize the performance and to discuss the performance differences between literate and illiterate participants in a well-defined study population. We describe the participant-selection procedure used to investigate this population. Three groups with similar sociocultural backgrounds living in a relatively homogeneous fishing community in southern Port...

The modulatory influence of literacy on the cognitive system of the human brain has been indicated in behavioral, neuroanatomic, and functional neuroimaging studies. In this study we explored the functional consequences of formal education and the acquisition of an alphabetic written language on two- and three-dimensional visual naming. The results show that illiterate subjects perform signific...