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Does neuronal recycling result in destructive competition? The influence of learning to read on the recognition of faces

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Van Paridon,  Jeroen
Psychology of Language Department, MPI for Psycholinguistics, Max Planck Society;
International Max Planck Research School for Language Sciences, MPI for Psycholinguistics, Max Planck Society;

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Ostarek,  Markus
Neurobiology of Language Department, MPI for Psycholinguistics, Max Planck Society;

Arunkumar,  Mrudula
Psychology of Language Department, MPI for Psycholinguistics, Max Planck Society;

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Huettig,  Falk
Psychology of Language Department, MPI for Psycholinguistics, Max Planck Society;
Center for Language Studies, External Organizations;
The Cultural Brain, MPI for Psycholinguistics, Max Planck Society;

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Van Paridon, J., Ostarek, M., Arunkumar, M., & Huettig, F. (2021). Does neuronal recycling result in destructive competition? The influence of learning to read on the recognition of faces. Psychological Science, 32, 459-465. doi:10.1177/0956797620971652.


Cite as: https://hdl.handle.net/21.11116/0000-0006-F689-A
Abstract
Written language, a human cultural invention, is far too recent for dedicated neural
infrastructure to have evolved in its service. Culturally newly acquired skills (e.g. reading) thus ‘recycle’ evolutionarily older circuits that originally evolved for different, but similar functions (e.g. visual object recognition). The destructive competition hypothesis predicts that this neuronal recycling has detrimental behavioral effects on the cognitive functions a cortical network originally evolved for. In a study with 97 literate, low-literate, and illiterate participants from the same socioeconomic background we find that even after adjusting for cognitive ability and test-taking familiarity, learning to read is associated with an increase, rather than a decrease, in object recognition abilities. These results are incompatible with the claim that neuronal recycling results in destructive competition and consistent with the possibility that learning to read instead fine-tunes general object recognition mechanisms, a hypothesis that needs further neuroscientific investigation.