Learning to read does not compete with face and object recognition

Abstract

Human cultural inventions, such as written language, are far too recent for dedicated neural infrastructure to have evolved in its service. Culturally newly acquired skills (e.g. reading) thus ‘recycle’ evolutionarily older circuits that originally evolved for different, but similar functions (e.g. visual object recognition). The destructive competition hypothesis predicts that this neuronal recycling has detrimental effects on the cognitive functions a cortical network originally evolved for. The converse possibility is that learning to read fine-tunes general object recognition mechanisms, resulting in improved recognition across categories. In a large-scale behavioral study with literate, low-literate, and illiterate participants from the same socioeconomic background we find that even after adjusting for cognitive ability and test-taking familiarity, literacy is associated with an increase, rather than a decrease, in object recognition abilities across object categories. These results are incompatible with the claim that neuronal recycling results in destructive competition.