Submission + - Can't Remember Faces? Blame your Reading Skills (newscientist.com)
Hugh Pickens writes: "Have you ever been embarrassed by introducing yourself to someone only for them to point out that you've met before? The New Scientist reports that new research suggests that learning to read competes with face recognition ability. To test the hypothesis Stanislas Dehaene at the INSERM-CEA Cognitive Neuroimaging Unit in Saclay, France carried out functional MRI brain scans on 10 people who could not read, 22 who learned to read as adults and 31 who did so as children. When the researchers showed participants pictures of faces, the visual word form area of those who could read was much less active than that of participants who could not read. Dehaene speculates that the ability to read may have hijacked a neuronal network that evolved to enable us to visually track animals. "The hypothesis suggests that this brain area has not evolved for reading but results from a reconfiguration of evolutionarily older brain circuits dedicated to object processing," says Manuel Carreiras at the Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language who prevously found that the brains of adults who learn to read as adults are structurally different to those who cannot read."
