The Role of the Dorsal Pathway in Word Recognition

The complexity of the cortical interactions required to read are astounding. Not least are the interactions that occur within the visual cortex and beyond in the first 300ms or so of seeing a word. It has been speculated that the dorsal visual pathway plays a vital role in this early visual network by providing a preattentive spatial code for the features of letters and words and providing a spatial navigation mechanism for guiding saccades across the line of text. While a large literature has accumulated to implicate the dorsal pathway in reading, and deficits in the dorsal pathway have been demonstrated to be associated with reading failure, the next challenge is to explore the efficacy of visual training as a technique in reading remediation.