Spatially Determined Deficits in Letter and Word Processing

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Abstract
We describe the performance of a brain-damaged subject, HR, whose reading performance can be described as letter-by-letter reading. On a number of experimental tasks she exhibited deficits in letter and bar detection. Her performance in these tasks indicated that her impairment in nonlexical letter detection tasks is spatially determined. We interpret the results within a multi-stage model of prelexical visual/perceptual processing. Within such a model, the impairments can be attributed to deficits at retino-centric and stimulus-centred levels of representation. We explain HR's letter-by-letter reading performance in terms of these deficits. In addition, we attempt to account for the differences in reading performance among patients with spatially determined deficits in terms of the proposed multi-stage model of word recognition.