title: Development of visual expertise for reading: rapid emergence of visual familiarity for an artificial script.
abstract: Adults produce left-lateralized N170 responses to visual words relative to control stimuli, even within tasks that do not require active reading. This specialization begins in preschoolers as a right-lateralized N170 effect. We investigated whether this developmental shift reflects an early learning phenomenon, such as attaining visual familiarity with a script, by training adults in an artificial script and measuring N170 responses before and afterward. Training enhanced the N170 response, especially over the right hemisphere. This suggests N170 sensitivity to visual familiarity with a script emerges before reading becomes sufficiently automatic to drive left-lateralized effects in a shallow encoding task.
authors.affiliation: Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland.
authors.forename: Urs
authors.initials: U
authors.lastname: Maurer
authors.forename: Vera C
authors.initials: VC
authors.lastname: Blau
authors.forename: Yuliya N
authors.initials: YN
authors.lastname: Yoncheva
authors.forename: Bruce D
authors.initials: BD
authors.lastname: McCandliss
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D001931:Brain Mapping; D004569:Electroencephalography / Q000379:methods; D005071:Evoked Potentials / Q000502:physiology; D005260:Female; D007839:Functional Laterality / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D007858:Learning; D008297:Male; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual / Q000502:physiology*; D010775:Photic Stimulation / Q000379:methods; D011930:Reaction Time / Q000502:physiology; D011932:Reading; D021641:Recognition, Psychology / Q000502:physiology*; D014825:Vocabulary; D055815:Young Adult