What, Where, When and How of Visual Word Recognition: A Bibliometrics Review
Fecha
2020Resumen
The neural/mental operations involved in the process of visual word recognition (VWR) are
fundamental for the efficient comprehension of written/printed words during reading. The present
study used CiteSpace, a visual analysis software, to identify the intellectual landscape where VWR
has been reviewed in the past decade. Thus, synthesized co-citation networks were analyzed to
explore and discuss the main questions raised in the VWR literature: the research fronts and the
emerging trends of research on this topic. Our results showed that the main questions addressed
in VWR studies during the last decade have been focused on four main aspects related to “what,”
“where,” “when,” and “how” of VWR; to be specific, the different types of representations
assessed during VWR (“what”), the locations and the timing of the brain activity involved in VWR
(“where” and “when”), and the interactivity among different representations during processing
(“how”). Among the revised studies, letter position coding was found to be the main topic of
interest, possibly reflecting the critical role of this process. Furthermore, the evidence found in
these studies consistently supported that VWR implies access to phonological, semantic, and morphological representations, which interact and modulate the processing of written words,
particularly during early stages. Altogether, our findings showed the evolution in VWR literature
regarding the different cognitive and neural operations involved in this process, highlighting the
growing interest over the last decade toward the top-down way that mental representations
interact.