In reply to baBouma:
Yes, the paper is available for a fee in other databases, but the link I gave is to on open access copy on a Cornell database of readings for a course in perception, cognition, and development. I provided the link so typophiles can examine how Grainger et. al., come to the conclusion that the baboons were “computing an orthographic code.”
Using results from primate performance, Grainger et. al., try to make the case “that orthographic processing may, at least partly, be constrained by general principles of visual object processing shared by monkeys and humans.” I've been arguing for some time, as Grainger et. al., do here that the perceptual proccessing dimension, in other words, what happens in the visual cortex, is often under-explored by cognitive scientists.
To make their case that baboons are perhaps computing an orthographic code, Grainger et. al., point to analogies in performance statistics between the baboons and humans, and cite the work of S. L. Brincat, C. E. Connor, on how the macaque brain synthesizes low-level neural signals for simple shape parts (simple contour fragments) into coherent representations of complete objects. The idea of Grainger et. al., is that full letters are analogous to these parts.
An alternate explanation that seems to be a more ecologically valid extension of the S. L. Brincat, C. E. Connor results might be that the baboons learned to recognize words as word-specific trans-glyphic featural patterns, rather than as orthographic sequences, that is, rather than “coding the word and nonword stimuli as a set of letter identities arranged in a particular order,” the results might have been based on across-the-word feature-conjunction similarities.
