Research on : Visual processing & literacy :

In a second step, I will report on a study that was interested in « the impact of literacy on visual processing »

In their published study 2014, Buiatti and his colleagues « assess the influence of the acquisition of reading ability on the successive stages of visual processing, and to evaluate to what extent early visual processing […] is already affected »

It seems important to emphasize that according to the authors : this is the first event-related potentials investigation named ERP (/i/-/ar/-/pi/) “on the impact of reading on visual system function that includes fully illiterate adults.”

It emerged from this study that : “reading acquisition leads to an enhancement of repetition suppression, indicating improved visual discrimination of exemplars within the same category”

And “learning to read dramatically enhances the magnitude, precision, and invariance of early visual coding […] and also enhances later neural activity.”

Thus, with regard to the characteristics of illiterate adults, it is mentioned that : to treat the strings, illiterates tend to use the right hemisphere of their brains, whereas the former illiterates and literates used to varying extents left hemisphere of their brain to process strings of characters.

Moreover, among illiterate people, literacy does not reflect the initial wave of visual processing in the brain, whereas in literate people this is the case.

Finally, unlike the former illiterates, illiterates have difficulty activating the processing of strings in their brains and they do a lot of repetition while reading.