Does Neuronal Recycling Result in Destructive Competition? The Influence of Learning to Read on the Recognition of Faces
研究通过比较识字、低识字和文盲被试，发现学习阅读不仅未损害反而提升了对象识别能力，反驳了神经元回收导致破坏性竞争的假说。
Written language, a human cultural invention, is far too recent a development for dedicated neural infrastructure to have evolved in its service. Newly acquired cultural skills, such as reading, thus recycle evolutionarily older circuits that originally evolved for different, but similar, functions (e.g., visual object recognition). The destructive-competition hypothesis predicts that this neuronal recycling has detrimental behavioral effects on the cognitive functions for which a cortical network originally evolved. In a study with 97 literate, low-literate, and illiterate participants from the same socioeconomic background, we found that even after adjusting for cognitive ability and test-taking familiarity, learning to read was associated with an increase, rather than a decrease, in object-recognition abilities. These results are incompatible with the claim that neuronal recycling results in destructive competition and are consistent with the possibility that learning to read instead fine-tunes general object-recognition mechanisms, a hypothesis that needs further neuroscientific investigation.