Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We argue that the connectionist modelling of visual word recognition can be made more explicit and more accurate by the incorporation of information concerning the initial projection of the visual field to the visual cortex. We show that this initial projection involves the precise splitting of the visual field into two hemifields, even in the case of the foveal projection: when a single word is fixated, that part of the word to the right of the fixation point initially goes to the left hemisphere and that part to the left initially goes to the right hemisphere. We present a number of reasons why this initial splitting should be assumed to persist into the higher cognitive processing concerned with visual word recognition. We explore three different phenomena - the processing priority given to the exterior letters of words, the optimum and preferred viewing positions for word recognition, and the core phenomena of dyslexia - and show that in each case a model based on a split architecture makes the correct predictions and captures the human data in a parsimonious and natural way. We conclude that anatomical information concerning the initial visual projection can enrich the modelling of visual word recognition.