Most people can read mirrored texts slowly and with effort . A team of scientists from the Basque Center for Cognition, Brain and Language demonstrated in 2011, for the first time, that this ability is due to the fact that we can mentally rotate these images and understand them automatically and unconsciously for a few moments.
“In a very early period of processing, between 150 and 250 milliseconds, the visual system completely rotates the words reflected in the mirror and recognizes them, ” Jon Andoni Duñabeitia, lead author of the investigation, told SINC agency. “although later the brain immediately detects that it is not the correct way and” remembers “that this way it is not necessary to process them “.
For the study, published in the journal NeuroImage , the researchers monitored the brain activity of 27 participants with electrodes while conducting two experiments in front of a computer screen. In the first, they were shown words with some letters rotated for 50 milliseconds, an imperceptible flash but one that the brain processes. And in the second, the complete specular word, for example OVITOM instead of MOTIVE. The results of the encephalogram revealed in both cases that, between 150 and 250 milliseconds, after presenting the words as seen in the mirror, the brain response was the same as when they are read in a normal way.
A good field to study dyslexia
“These results open a new field in the study of the effects of involuntary rotation of letters and words in individuals with difficulties associated with reading (dyslexia) or writing (dysgraphia),” said Duñabeitia.
In this sense, parents should not worry when their children begin to write by rotating the letters: ” It is the direct consequence of the mirror rotation property of the visual system . In fact, it is normal for children to start writing like this.
“Now we know that rotating the letters is not the exclusive problem of some dyslexics, since everyone does it naturally and unconsciously, but what must be understood is why normal readers can inhibit it and some people with reading and writing difficulties cannot, confusing “b” for “d”, for example, “explains Duñabeitia.
There are still unknowns to clear, for example, it is not known why reading inhibits mental rotation in the mirror, when we talk about a very common visual ability in animals. “A tiger is a tiger from the right profile and from the left, but a word written in a mirror loses its meaning; although now we already know that it is not so incomprehensible to our visual system because it is capable of processing it as if it were correct” the scientist.
Reference: Duñabeitia et al. 2011. Through the looking-glass: Mirror reading. NeuroImage 54 (4) 3004–3009
