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Updated: Jun 11, 2026

Exploring Infant Sensitivity to Visual Language using Eye Tracking and the Preferential Looking Paradigm
Published on: May 15, 2019
Development of visual expertise for reading: rapid emergence of visual familiarity for an artificial script
Urs Maurer1, Vera C Blau, Yuliya N Yoncheva
1Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland.
Abstract:
Adults produce left-lateralized N170 responses to visual words relative to control stimuli, even within tasks that do not require active reading. This specialization begins in preschoolers as a right-lateralized N170 effect. We investigated whether this developmental shift reflects an early learning phenomenon, such as attaining visual familiarity with a script, by training adults in an artificial script and measuring N170 responses before and afterward. Training enhanced the N170 response, especially over the right hemisphere. This suggests N170 sensitivity to visual familiarity with a script emerges before reading becomes sufficiently automatic to drive left-lateralized effects in a shallow encoding task.
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