Ortographic Processing In Baboons

The experiment by Grainger et al. (2012) asked if efficient processing of orthographic information could be achieved in the lack of previous language knowledge. Most of the researchers have ignoredthe importance of printed words as visual objects. Because of the discovery of the neural structures (left ventral occipitotemporal cortex) which take part in orthographic processing and are associatedwith object and face processing, it has encouraged a reconsideration in visual word recognition. ***Grainger et al. performed an experiment that consisted in training of six baboons to discriminateEnglish real words from nonwords with 4 letter-strings in block of 100 trials. It’s worth mentioning that a word was defined as a string of letters that was repeatly presented, whereas a nonword wasseldom repeated. The baboons, who had microchips implanted in their forearms, had to touch the screen and were given a food reward after a correct response. The results were that baboons were usingorthographic information in order to discriminate words from nonwords. Also, they learned to discriminate words from nonwords at 75% accuracy. When a word seen for the first time was presented, baboonsshould have been processed like a nonwords but it didn’t happened. So, this implied that the baboons had extracted knowledge. The baboons had learned to discriminate different letters from each otherand to associate those letter identities with positional information. Their coding is reflected in their ability to discriminate words from nonwords, the significant correlation between bigram frequencyand the accuracy of responses to words and the increase in errors in response to nonword stimuli that were orthographically more similar to known words. Therefore, their results support theconclusion that language skills aren’t necessary to distinguish words.
In the present article, the methodology of the experiment is carefully and clearly described in details. They used statistical tools...