The gate for reading: reflections on the recognition potential.

The recognition potential (RP) is an electrical response of the brain peaking around 200 to 250ms after stimulus onset and obtained when subjects view recognizable images, such as words or pictures. There is considerable debate as to whether the RP reflects a visual-structural step in the perceptual analysis or a part of the semantic-conceptual processing of the stimulus. The functional response of the RP noticeably resembles that of the seemingly controversial visual word form area (VWFA). This parallelism is hereby developed, and proposals for a processing system presumably accounting for the heterogeneous results on the RP are also suggested. According to these proposals, the RP is originated in the VWFA, an area that would play a cardinal role in the reading process, receiving and integrating different types of information that extend from letter identification to contextual semantic information.