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The purpose of this chapter is twofold. First, after a brief consideration of the major computational problems that must be resolved by the visual stages of reading, it reviews the evidence for or against the hypothesis that part of the left inferotemporal cortex functions as a specialized “visual word form area” in literate adults. Second, assuming that this area does indeed contain neurons that have become attuned to visual word recognition, it asks how these neurons might be organized. Considering that word recognition probably arises from a minimal “recycling” of the preexisting visual object recognition system, the chapter presents a hypothetical model, according to which a hierarchy of local combination detector (LCD) neurons, inspired from the known architecture of the primate inferotemporal cortex, collectively implement an invariant neural code for written words.

As with most complex behaviors, visual word recognition is thought to result from the dynamic interplay between the elements of a distributed cortical and subcortical network. To understand fully how visual word recognition is achieved therefore, and how it may fail in developmental dyslexia, not only the necessary and sufficient complement of nodes that comprise this network—its functional anatomy—need to be identified, but also how information flows through this network with time needs to be understood, and indeed how the structure of the network itself may adapt in both the short and long term. This chapter takes a historical approach to reviewing recent magnetoencephalography (MEG) research that elucidates these temporal dynamics, focusing particularly on events with the first 300 milliseconds (ms) of a visually presented word, and which should set crucial constraints on models of visual word recognition and reading.

This chapter analyzes the pottery of late prehistoric Europe. Jars, bowls, and cups were the three main categories of pottery vessels that were in use in the Early Bronze Age. Bowls and cups were decorated differently from jars, and their surfaces were finished differently. Jars are the only category that had a purposely roughened surface. Bowls and cups were polished smooth. And jars are the only category within which each individual vessel was distinguished from every other by the pattern of its ornament. From the latter fact, it is argued that jars in the Early and Middle Bronze Age were individualized in a way that bowls and cups were not; each was deliberately made different from all others in order that the household that owned it could mark it as its own, and perhaps even use it to display to others in the community that it had abundant stores of grain.

This chapter aims to describe the connectionist perspective on repetition priming. The first section provides an overview of the connectionist framework, and more specifically, connectionist models of word perception. The section that follows reviews empirical findings concerning several different issues related to repetition priming — the purpose of this section is both to show how the network approach has served to generate new hypotheses and to demonstrate how this approach allows for new conceptualizations of some old ideas. The chapter closes with a discussion of the relationship between the connectionist approach and accounts which have developed within the activation and memory traditions.

Cognitive brain disorders, such as dyslexia, also come in for their fair share of misconceptions, and this is the case among laypeople, policymakers, and even teachers. But oddly, the misconceptions surrounding disorders affecting “cold” cognition are the mirror images of our errors in reasoning about psychiatric disorders that we associate with “warm” emotions. We are all too eager to assume that major depression is innate, controlled by the material brain and out of the patients’ hands; for dyslexia, we incorrectly assume the opposite—that it is “just” “in our mind” (not in our brain and genes). Chapter 13 explains how reading works and what dyslexia really is, and it shows how our misconceptions about it arise from Dualism and Essentialism.