Researchers have successfully unraveled the neurological process that makes it possible for us to recognize letters and numbers.
The results of the study show that the linguistic context given by a word impacts the way in which single abstract representations of the letters that make it up are accessed, and that such access is partially independent from the physical properties of the stimuli.
"We analyzed the influence of the context given by a word when linking the physical traits of its components to the abstract representations of letters," explained Nicola Molinaro, main author of the study and researcher of the Basque Research Center on Cognition, Brain and Language (BCBL).
"Otherwise, it would not be possible to think that a number can activate the representation of a letter when it is inserted among a string of letters that make up a word (M4T3R14L).
"We used numbers that visually resemble letters (1-I, 5-S, 7-T), and we replaced them," states the expert.
The words were presented to participants during tenths of milliseconds (imperceptible to consciousness).
Then, the correct words where shown so that participants could read them (for example, M4T3R14L - MATERIAL). Control strings including numbers explicitly different to letters (M9T6R26L- MATERIAL) and word identity (MATERIAL- MATERIAL) were also included.
While participants read the words in silence, scientists recorded brain potentials associated to events (ERPs), which showed three main effects-the first one is that, over the 150 ms window, identical strings and strings including visually similar numbers, compared to control strings, caused a reduction in positivity, that is, in the ease of recognition.
