title: Literacy acquisition reduces the influence of automatic holistic processing of faces and houses.
abstract: Writing was invented too recently to have influenced the human genome. Consequently, reading acquisition must rely on partial recycling of pre-existing brain systems. Prior fMRI evidence showed that in literates a left-hemispheric visual region increases its activation to written strings relative to illiterates and reduces its response to faces. Increasing literacy also leads to a stronger right-hemispheric lateralization for faces. Here, we evaluated whether this reorganization of the brain's face system has behavioral consequences for the processing of non-linguistic visual stimuli. Three groups of adult illiterates, ex-illiterates and literates were tested with the sequential composite face paradigm that evaluates the automaticity with which faces are processed as wholes. Illiterates were consistently more holistic than participants with reading experience in dealing with faces. A second experiment replicated this effect with both faces and houses. Brain reorganization induced by literacy seems to reduce the influence of automatic holistic processing of faces and houses by enabling the use of a more analytic and flexible processing strategy, at least when holistic processing is detrimental to the task.
authors.affiliation: Faculty of Psychology, University of Lisbon, Alameda Universidade, 1649-013 Lisbon, Portugal. Electronic address: paulo.ventura@gmail.com.
authors.forename: Paulo
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Ventura
authors.forename: Tânia
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Fernandes
authors.forename: Laurent
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Cohen
authors.forename: José
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Morais
authors.forename: Régine
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Kolinsky
authors.forename: Stanislas
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Dehaene
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D001921:Brain / Q000502:physiology; D004522:Educational Status; D005145:Face; D005260:Female; D007839:Functional Laterality; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual; D010775:Photic Stimulation
keywords: Analytic processing; Face processing; Holistic processing; House processing; Reading