Non-Human Recognition of Orthography: How is it implemented and how does it differ from Human orthographic processing
Benjamin Gagl, Ivonne Weyers, Susanne Eisenhauer, Christian Fiebach, Michael Colombo, Damian Scarf, Johannes Ziegler, Jonathan Grainger, Onur Güntürkün, Jutta Mueller · Bernstein Conference 2024
The ability to robustly recognize strings of letters, a cornerstone of reading, was observed in Baboons and Pigeons despite their lack of phonological and semantic knowledge. Here, we apply a comparative modeling approach to investigate the neuro-cognitive basis of Human, Baboon, and Pigeon orthographic decision behavior, addressing whether phylogenetic relatedness entails similar underlying neuro-cognitive phenotypes. We use the highly transparent Speechless Reader Model (SLR), which assumes letter string recognition based on widely accepted computational principles of predictive coding so th