Learning to Read Upside-down: A Study of Perceptual Expertise and Acquisition, of Relevance to Rehabilitation of Right Hemianopic Dyslexia

Reading is an expert visual and ocular motor function, learned almost exclusively in a single orientation. Characterizing this expertise can be accomplished by contrasts between reading of normal and inverted text, in which perceptual but not linguistic factors are altered. Our goal was to examine this inversion effect in healthy subjects reading text, to derive behavioural and ocular motor markers of perceptual reading expertise, and to study these parameters before and after training with inverted reading.