The Learning Brain

Ahr, Emmanuel; Borst, Grégoire; Houdé, Olivier

doi:10.1027/2151-2604/a000263

Cited by 57 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 83 publications

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“…Making children aware of the problem of orientation, displaying the characters, and teaching 1st-grade children how to write the characters seems sufficient to enable typically developing children to restore orientation information. A well-supported theory claims that it requires inhibition of the mirror generalization process [69,72,73].…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Synoptic and Theoretical Account of Character (Digits and Capital Letters) Reversal in Writings by Typically Developing Children

Fischer

Luxembourger

2018

Education Sciences

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Reversing characters (digits and letters) when writing, and complete mirror writing, raise one of the oldest and most mysterious questions in developmental and educational psychology: Why do five-year-old children write symbols (e.g., ∃ for E) they have neither learnt nor seen? Attempts to draw up a complete explanatory theory of character reversal in writings by typically developing children were long hindered by the existence of a seemingly satisfactory explanation (left-hand writing), the failure to bring together research in neuropsychology and educational psychology, and the failure to consider the shape and structure of the characters. The present paper remedies this situation by describing a new, comprehensive theory based on recent neuropsychological findings and extensive empirical observations. The theory assumes that a character's orientation, detected in the early visual processing area, is deleted (or made inaccessible) by the mirror generalization process during transfer to memory. Consequently, there is a period, usually around age five, during which children have representations of the characters' shapes but not their orientations. Hence, when asked to write a character, children have to improvise its orientation, and the orientation they choose (implicitly, non-consciously) is often derived from the writing direction in their culture. Introduction: Historical BackgroundCharacter reversal, which results in left-right reversed characters (letters and digits) that appear normal when read in a mirror, is a major component of mirror writing. In the scientific literature, it was first described in 1878 by Buchwald, who reported several cases of character reversal in writing by patients with brain lesions and by healthy individuals, most notably children, nearly all of whom wrote with their left hand [1]. This pioneering study launched a new field of research and triggered numerous reports of mirror writing by both pathological and non-pathological individuals. Less felicitously, Buchwald's implicit suggestion that mirror writing was restricted to people who wrote with their left hand, whether naturally or deliberately, would cloud research for over a century.Erlenmeyer immediately included Buchwald's paper in his book on "Writing", quoting at length the paragraph describing children who mirror wrote with their left hand, but, when alerted to the incorrectness of their writing, wrote correctly with their right hand [2]. Furthermore, by suggesting "abductive left-hand writing" (linkshändige Abductionsschrift in German) as a more appropriate name for "mirror writing", Erlenmeyer reduced mirror writing to a mechanistic result of writing with the left hand: Characters and words are reversed when an individual writes abductively (outwards from the body midline) with the left hand.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Synoptic and Theoretical Account of Character (Digits and Capital Letters) Reversal in Writings by Typically Developing Children

Fischer

Luxembourger

2018

Education Sciences

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Spatial biases in processing mirror letters by literate subjects

Patro,

Gross,

Friedrich

2024

Read Writ

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Preschool children often confuse letters with their mirror images when they try to read and write. Mirror confusion seems to occur more often in line with the direction of script (e.g., left-to-right for the Latin alphabetic script), suggesting that the processing of letter orientation and text directionality may be interrelated in preliterate age. When children go to school, mirror mistakes in writing/reading letters disappear. Here we ask whether the processing of letter shapes and text direction are still related in readers at different proficiency levels. Literate subjects – school children from the 1st and 4th grades and adults – decided under time pressure whether a displayed letter was oriented correctly or incorrectly (mirrored). We observed that reaction times were faster when a letter was oriented rightward, i.e. in line with the cultural text direction (left-to-right), but we did not find any differences between the groups. We conclude that, even if mirror mistakes disappear during primary school years, letter shapes are still processed in a close relation to the left-to-right reading direction in the Latin script.

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Neurocomputational Methods

Thomas¹,

Porayska-Pomsta²

2022

The Cambridge Handbook of Cognitive Development

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Humans are able to classify complex visual objects with extremely high accuracy. Recently, deep convolutional neural network (DCNN) models have reached and even surpassed human performance at this task. Among recent networks, the deeper the architecture, the better the performance. Although loosely inspired by biological brains, it remains unclear whether models reaching human-level accuracy also perform computations similar to those in the human brain. In earlier studies using shallower architectures with poorer object classification accuracy, greater depth and higher task performance were associated with improved explanation of inferior temporal cortex (IT) (Khaligh-Razavi & Kriegeskorte, 2014; Yamins et al., 2014). Our results show that this is not the case for state-of-the-art deep architectures that near or surpass human performance; the deepest, best-performing models are not best at explaining representations in human IT. In particular, deep residual networks (ResNets) are a relatively poor match to the brain, despite their very high classification performance. These findings open the door to detailed explorations of the architectures that best account for the representational transformations, and thus computations, performed in the ventral visual stream.

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The Learning Brain

Cited by 57 publications

References 83 publications

A Synoptic and Theoretical Account of Character (Digits and Capital Letters) Reversal in Writings by Typically Developing Children

A Synoptic and Theoretical Account of Character (Digits and Capital Letters) Reversal in Writings by Typically Developing Children

Spatial biases in processing mirror letters by literate subjects

Neurocomputational Methods

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