title: Orthographic processing in pigeons (Columba livia).
abstract: Learning to read involves the acquisition of letter-sound relationships (i.e., decoding skills) and the ability to visually recognize words (i.e., orthographic knowledge). Although decoding skills are clearly human-unique, given they are seated in language, recent research and theory suggest that orthographic processing may derive from the exaptation or recycling of visual circuits that evolved to recognize everyday objects and shapes in our natural environment. An open question is whether orthographic processing is limited to visual circuits that are similar to our own or a product of plasticity common to many vertebrate visual systems. Here we show that pigeons, organisms that separated from humans more than 300 million y ago, process words orthographically. Specifically, we demonstrate that pigeons trained to discriminate words from nonwords picked up on the orthographic properties that define words and used this knowledge to identify words they had never seen before. In addition, the pigeons were sensitive to the bigram frequencies of words (i.e., the common co-occurrence of certain letter pairs), the edit distance between nonwords and words, and the internal structure of words. Our findings demonstrate that visual systems organizationally distinct from the primate visual system can also be exapted or recycled to process the visual word form.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Otago, Dunedin 9054, New Zealand; damian@psy.otago.ac.nz colombo@psy.otago.ac.nz.
authors.forename: Damian
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Scarf
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, Biopsychology, Ruhr-University Bochum, D-44780 Bochum, Germany.
authors.forename: Karoline
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Boy
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, Biopsychology, Ruhr-University Bochum, D-44780 Bochum, Germany.
authors.forename: Anelisie
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Uber Reinert
authors.affiliation: Department of Physics, University of Otago, Dunedin 9054, New Zealand.
authors.forename: Jack
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Devine
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, Biopsychology, Ruhr-University Bochum, D-44780 Bochum, Germany.
authors.forename: Onur
authors.initials: O
authors.lastname: Güntürkün
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Otago, Dunedin 9054, New Zealand; damian@psy.otago.ac.nz colombo@psy.otago.ac.nz.
authors.forename: Michael
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Colombo
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D010856:Columbidae / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D010215:Papio; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual
keywords: comparative cognition; orthographic processing; pigeon; reading