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.

书面语言是一项人类文化发明，但对于专用的神经基础设施而言，它的发展还为时过早，无法在其服务中进化。新获得的文化技能，例如阅读，因此循环利用了原来为不同但相似的功能（例如，视觉对象识别）而进化的旧电路。在破坏性的竞争假说预测这种神经元循环对皮质网络最初进化的认知功能具有有害的行为影响。在一项对 97 名来自同一社会经济背景的识字、文盲和文盲参与者进行的研究中，我们发现，即使在调整认知能力和应试熟悉度后，学习阅读也与增加而不是减少有关物体识别能力。这些结果与神经元再循环导致破坏性竞争的说法不符，并且与学习阅读而不是微调一般物体识别机制的可能性一致，这一假设需要进一步的神经科学调查。