Author
Listed:
- Rishi Rajalingham
(Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
- Kohitij Kar
(Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
- Sachi Sanghavi
(Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
- Stanislas Dehaene
(Collège de France
Cognitive Neuroimaging Unit, CEA, INSERM, Université Paris-Sud, Université Paris-Saclay, NeuroSpin Center)
- James J. DiCarlo
(Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
Abstract
The ability to recognize written letter strings is foundational to human reading, but the underlying neuronal mechanisms remain largely unknown. Recent behavioral research in baboons suggests that non-human primates may provide an opportunity to investigate this question. We recorded the activity of hundreds of neurons in V4 and the inferior temporal cortex (IT) while naïve macaque monkeys passively viewed images of letters, English words and non-word strings, and tested the capacity of those neuronal representations to support a battery of orthographic processing tasks. We found that simple linear read-outs of IT (but not V4) population responses achieved high performance on all tested tasks, even matching the performance and error patterns of baboons on word classification. These results show that the IT cortex of untrained primates can serve as a precursor of orthographic processing, suggesting that the acquisition of reading in humans relies on the recycling of a brain network evolved for other visual functions.
Suggested Citation
Rishi Rajalingham & Kohitij Kar & Sachi Sanghavi & Stanislas Dehaene & James J. DiCarlo, 2020.
"The inferior temporal cortex is a potential cortical precursor of orthographic processing in untrained monkeys,"
Nature Communications, Nature, vol. 11(1), pages 1-13, December.
Handle:
RePEc:nat:natcom:v:11:y:2020:i:1:d:10.1038_s41467-020-17714-3
DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-17714-3
Download full text from publisher
Corrections
All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:nat:natcom:v:11:y:2020:i:1:d:10.1038_s41467-020-17714-3. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.
If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.
We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .
If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.
For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.nature.com .
Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through
the various RePEc services.