Letter Rotation Research Articles

The benefit of choice on task performance: Reduced difficulty effects in free-choice versus forced-choice tasks.

We investigated how self-determined (free) versus imposed (forced) choices influence task performance. To this end, we examined how changes in perceptual and central decision-processing difficulties affect task performance in an environment where free-choice and forced-choice tasks were intermixed. In Experiments 1 (N = 43) and 2 (N = 42), perceptual processing difficulty was varied by altering colored dot proportions (easy vs. hard color discrimination task). In Experiment 3 (N = 58), decision-processing difficulty was adjusted by changing the rotation degree of letters (easy vs. hard letter rotation task). Across all experiments, both free-choice and forced-choice performance were more impaired with harder stimuli, but this effect was generally less pronounced in freely chosen tasks. Specifically, this was evident from significant interactions between processing mode (free vs. forced) and difficulty (easy vs. hard) in the mean reaction times (RTs) for the tasks with the difficulty manipulation. Thus, processing in free-choice tasks is generally less affected by environmental changes (i.e., variation in information difficulties). We discuss how the benefit of self-determined choices over imposed choices can be explained by motivational and performance-optimization accounts, while also considering the finding that participants adjusted their task choices toward tasks with easier stimuli (i.e., significant main effect of task difficulty on choosing the task with the difficulty manipulation). Specifically, we discuss how having control over task choices might lead to more stable information processing and allow people to choose more difficult tasks when this increased difficulty has a relatively small impact on their performance.

How embodied is cognition? fMRI and behavioral evidence for common neural resources underlying motor planning and mental rotation of bodily stimuli.

Functional neuroimaging shows that dorsal frontoparietal regions exhibit conjoint activity during various motor and cognitive tasks. However, it is unclear whether these regions serve several, computationally independent functions, or underlie a motor "core process" that is reused to serve higher-order functions. We hypothesized that mental rotation capacity relies on a phylogenetically older motor process that is rooted within these areas. This hypothesis entails that neural and cognitive resources recruited during motor planning predict performance in seemingly unrelated mental rotation tasks. To test this hypothesis, we first identified brain regions associated with motor planning by measuring functional activations to internally-triggered vs externally-triggered finger presses in 30 healthy participants. Internally-triggered finger presses yielded significant activations in parietal, premotor, and occipitotemporal regions. We then asked participants to perform two mental rotation tasks outside the scanner, consisting of hands or letters as stimuli. Parietal and premotor activations were significant predictors of individual reaction times when mental rotation involved hands. We found no association between motor planning and performance in mental rotation of letters. Our results indicate that neural resources in parietal and premotor cortex recruited during motor planning also contribute to mental rotation of bodily stimuli, suggesting a common core component underlying both capacities.

The time course of planar and non-planar rotations in a letter rotation task

Mental rotation (MR) of character letters requires participants to mentally rotate the letter in their minds’ eyes through a process akin to the physical rotation of the stimulus. It has been suggested that different cognitive processes are engaged during such MR of both canonical and mirror-reversed letters. In addition to the planar rotation of the canonical letters, an additional “flip-over” process (non-planar rotation) has been assumed during the MR of mirror-reversed letters. However, the temporal relationship between planar and non-planar rotation has not been systematically investigated. In this study, the occurrence of both planar and non-planar rotations were examined through the analysis of the event-related brain potentials (ERPs) elicited by canonical or mirror-reversed letters presented at different rotation angles between 300 and 1000 ms post-stimulus onset over consecutive 50ms time-windows. For smaller rotation angles (30° and 60°), non-planar rotation preceded planar rotation. For letters rotated by 90°, planar and non-planar rotation occurred at the same time. For larger angles (120° and 150°), the letter was first rotated within the plane (planar rotation) and afterwards it was also rotated out-of-the-plane (non-planar rotation) until it was fully canonicalized. Thus, the temporal relationship between planar and non-planar rotation differed for each rotation angle, with the non-planar rotation occurring at increasingly later intervals for different points in time for progressively larger rotation angles. These findings have relevant methodological implications for studies investigating the psychophysiological correlates of the mental rotation of mirror letters.

The inhibition of mirror generalization of letters in school-aged children.

Gender differences in spatial abilities favor males in both childhood and adulthood. During early development, this discrepancy can be attributed, among other things, to the influence of an early testosterone surge in boys, societal stereotypes, and expectations about gender. In the present work, we created a spatial task (including letter rotation and letter mirroring) which used letters as stimuli and evaluated the performance of school-aged children (6-10 years old). During this age period, children are being taught literacy skills which rely on the reorganization of cortical networks and the breakdown of mirror generalization. We divided our sample (N = 142, 73 females) into two age groups: 1st-2nd (literacy acquisition; N = 70, 33 females) and 3rd-5th (literacy consolidation; N = 72, 40 females) graders. While boys performed significantly better in letter rotation in the older group, girls' performance remained substandard in both groups. This pattern is reversed for the mirror task, with older girls outperforming their younger counterparts and boys having similar performance in the two groups. Since the age period of our sample is not associated with large variations in the levels of reproductive steroids, we propose that the similarity of performance between younger and older girls in mental rotation of letters could be associated with society's traditional attitudes and expectations on the relationship between visual-spatial skills and gender. As for the mirror task, while only girls had a significant difference between the two age groups, boys did show an improvement, as expected for the inhibition of mirror generalization for letters during reading acquisition.

Advanced aging effects on implicit motor imagery and its links to motor performance: An investigation via mental rotation of letters, hands, and feet.

This study focuses on changes in implicit motor imagery during advanced aging and these changes' co-occurrences with physical motor deficits. We administered a mental rotation (MR) task with letters, hands, and feet to 28 young adults (20-27 years) and to 71 older adults (60-87 years), and assessed motor skills (gait mobility and hand dexterity) and neuropsychological performance. Compared to young adults, older adults showed lower MR performance for all stimuli and stronger biomechanical constraint effects on both hand and foot rotation. Moreover, the foot biomechanical constraint effect continued to increase during late adulthood, and declines in hand and foot motor imagery emerged at earlier old ages than declines in visual imagery. These results first demonstrated distinct aging trajectories of hand motor imagery, foot motor imagery, and visual imagery. Exploratory partial correlation analysis for older adults showed positive associations of low-level perceptual-motor skills (Trail Making Test-A performance) with hand and foot MR performance and positive associations of mobility (Timed Up and Go test performance) with foot and letter MR performance. These associations exhibited somewhat different patterns from those of young adults and raised the possibility that age-related declines in motor (and visual) imagery co-occur with declines in motor functioning.

Letter rotations: through the magnifying glass and What evidence found there

ABSTRACT Expert readers have a wide tolerance for distortions of the letters that make up a word. Nevertheless, the limits of this invariance are still under debate. To scrutinise this issue, we focused on a single parameter, letter rotation, as it serves to disentangle the predictions from neurally-inspired models of word recognition. Whereas the Local-Combination-Detector (LCD) model predicts invariance up to 45°, the SERIOL model predicts a linear cost until 60°. To test these predictions, Experiments 1 and 2 employed four rotation angles (0°, 22.5°, 45°, 67.5°) in lexical decision and semantic categorisation. The cost was minimal at 22.5°, sizeable at 45°, and considerably large at 67.5°. In Experiment 3, we focused on four moderate rotation angles (<45°). We found a gradual reading cost that increased at 45°. Thus, while there is a resilience limit around 45° favouring LCD, less steep angles also produce a reading cost, backing the SERIOL model.

Mental rotation of hands and objects in ageing and Parkinson’s disease: differentiating motor imagery and visuospatial ability

Motor imagery supports motor learning and performance and has the potential to be a useful strategy for neurorehabilitation. However, motor imagery ability may be impacted by ageing and neurodegeneration, which could limit its therapeutic effectiveness. Motor imagery can be assessed implicitly using a hand laterality task (HLT), whereby laterality judgements are slower for stimuli corresponding to physically more difficult postures, as indicated by a “biomechanical constraint” effect. Performance is also found to differ between back and palm views of the hand, which may differentially recruit visual and sensorimotor processes. Older adults and individuals with Parkinson’s disease (PD) have shown altered performance on the HLT; however, the effects of both ageing and PD on laterality judgements for the different hand views (back and palm) have not been directly examined. The present study compared healthy younger, healthy older, and PD groups on the HLT, an object-based mental rotation task, and an explicit motor imagery measure. The older and PD groups were slower than the younger group on the HLT, particularly when judging laterality from the back view, and exhibited increased biomechanical constraint effects for the palm. While response times were generally similar between older and PD groups, the PD group showed reduced accuracy for the back view. Letter rotation was slower and less accurate only in the PD group, while explicit motor imagery ratings did not differ significantly between groups. These results suggest that motor imagery may be slowed but relatively preserved in both typical ageing and neurodegeneration, while a PD-specific impairment in visuospatial processing may influence task performance. The findings have implications for the use of motor imagery in rehabilitation protocols.

On the time course of the tolerance of letter detectors to rotations: A masked priming ERP investigation

A straightforward prediction of the Local Combination Detectors [LCD] model of word recognition (Dehaene et al., 2005) is that letter rotations above 40–45° should disrupt the mapping of the visual input onto orthographic representations. However, the evidence supporting this claim is scarce and not conclusive. To shed light on this issue, we conducted a masked repetition priming lexical decision experiment while recording the participants’ EEG measures. Targets were always presented in the standard horizontal format, and we rotated the individual letters of the identity/unrelated primes (0°, 45°, or 90°). Behavioral and Event-Related Potentials (ERP) results revealed that the identity priming effect decreased as a function of letter rotation. Importantly, the ERP data allowed us to examine in detail the time course of processing of words with rotated letters. Amplitude comparisons showed that identity priming followed the typical course for 0° primes (i.e., it started around 100 ms, in the visual feature encoding stage, and strengthened with processing time). The parallel effect for 45° primes emerged later, at around 175 ms. This pattern strongly suggests that letter rotations at around 45° have a processing cost, thus providing evidence in favor of the LCD model of word recognition (Dehaene et al., 2005).

Enhancing female older adults’ spatial visualisation ability via a virtual pattern-making module

ABSTRACT This study examines how virtual pattern-making training enhances older adults’ spatial visualisation ability, depending on their ethnic background. Following receipt of IRB approval, a total of 600 female older adults were recruited to the study. To assess participants’ current spatial visualisation ability, a letter rotation test was employed both pre-test and post-test. A virtual pattern-making training video was developed using a virtual prototyping programme, Browzwear VStitcher. The training video explained the basic concept of virtual pattern-making with examples, and participants were then asked to watch the video between pre-test and post-test. The results of the two tests were compared using a paired sample t-test. The results found that, of the four ethnic groups, African American showed a significant improvement in letter rotation scores after the training. The findings of this study will contribute to the knowledge and understanding of virtual pattern-making in relation to older adults’ cognitive skills.

How resilient is reading to letter rotations? A parafoveal preview investigation.

Skilled readers have developed a certain amount of tolerance to variations in the visual form of words (e.g., CAPTCHAs, handwritten text, etc.). To examine how visual distortion affects the mapping from the visual input onto abstract word representations during normal reading, we focused on a single type of distortion: letter rotation. Importantly, two leading neurally inspired models of word recognition (SERIOL model, Whitney, 2001; LCD model, Dehaene et al., 2005) make distinct predictions: Whereas the SERIOL model postulates that the cost of letter rotation increases gradually, the LCD model assumes an all-or-none boundary at around 40° to 45° rotation angle. To examine these predictions in a normal reading scenario, we conducted a parafoveal preview experiment using the gaze-contingent boundary change paradigm. The parafoveal previews were identical or unrelated to the target word. Critically, each preview's individual letters were rotated 15°, 30°, 45°, or 60°. Apart from the parafoveal previews, all text, including target words, was presented with letters in their canonical upright orientation. Results showed that the advantage of the identity preview condition in eye fixation times on the target word decreased progressively by rotation angle. This pattern of results favors the view that the cost of letter rotation during normal reading increases gradually as a function of the angle of rotation. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Semantic interference is not modality specific: Evidence from sound naming with distractor pictures.

In three experiments, participants named environmental sounds (e.g., the bleating of a sheep by producing the word "sheep") in the presence of distractor pictures. In Experiment 1, we observed faster responses in sound naming with congruent pictures (e.g., sheep; congruency facilitation) and slower responses with semantically related pictures (e.g., donkey; semantic interference), each compared with unrelated pictures (e.g., violin). In Experiments 2 and 3, we replicated these effects and used a psychological refractory period approach (combining an arrow decision or letter rotation task as Task 1 with sound naming as Task 2) to investigate the locus of the effects. Congruency facilitation was underadditive with dual-task interference suggesting that it arises, in part, during pre-central processing stages in sound naming (i.e., sound identification). In contrast, semantic interference was additive with dual-task interference suggesting that it arises during central (or post-central) processing stages in sound naming (i.e., response selection or later processes). These results demonstrate the feasibility of sound naming tasks for chronometric investigations of word production. Furthermore, they highlight that semantic interference is not restricted to the use of target pictures and distractor words but can be observed with quite different target-distractor configurations. The experiments support the view that congruency facilitation and semantic interference reflect some general cognitive mechanism involved in word production. These results are discussed in the context of the debate about semantic-lexical selection mechanisms in word production.

Spatial and egocentric mental rotation in patients with cervical dystonia.

Mental rotation has attracted the interest of cognitive research on dystonia, but at the moment, contrasting data are available on whether this complex cognitive ability is impaired in the disorder. Here, we assessed spatial and egocentric mental rotation in patients with cervical dystonia (CD). Patients with CD and healthy controls were required to perform a letter rotation task (spatial mental rotation) and to judge laterality of front-facing and back-facing human images (egocentric mental rotation). CD patients were selectively impaired on letter rotation, whereas they did not differ from controls when judging laterality of both front-facing and back-facing bodies. These findings support the view according to which neural circuits involved in spatial processing are dysfunctional in CD.

When does rotation disrupt letter encoding? Testing the resilience of letter detectors in the initial moments of processing.

Previous research has reported that both letter and word identification are slower when the stimuli are presented at rotations above 45° than when presented in their canonical horizontal view. Indeed, influential models of word recognition posit that letter detectors in the visual word recognition system are disrupted by rotation angles above 40° or 45° (e.g., Local Combinations Detector model; Dehaene, Cohen, Sigman, & Vinckier, 2005, Trends in Cognitive Sciences). However, recent experiments have shown robust masked identity/form priming effects for 90° rotated words, thus calling into question this assumption. Here we aimed to isolate the degree to which letter detectors are disrupted when manipulating letter rotation in three masked identity priming letter match experiments. Probes and targets were always presented in the canonical upright position, whereas forwardly masked primes were rotated in different angles. The rotation angles were 0° versus 45° (Experiment 1), 22.5° versus 67.5° (Experiment 2), and 45° versus 90° (Experiment 3). Results showed a sizeable masked identity priming effect regardless of the rotation angle, hence demonstrating that letter detectors are not disrupted by rotations smaller than 90° in the early moments of letter processing. This pattern suggests that letter detectors are more resilient to changes in visual form than predicted by the LCD model.

Does letter rotation decrease transposed letter priming effects?

Perceptual learning accounts of orthographic coding predict that transposed-letter (TL) priming effects should be smaller when the prime and target stimuli are not presented in their canonical (left-to-right horizontal in English) orientation (Dehaene, Cohen, Sigman, & Vinckier, 2005; Grainger & Holcomb, 2009). In contrast, abstract letter unit accounts would propose that TL priming effects should be essentially unaffected by presenting stimuli in most unfamiliar text orientations (Witzel, Qiao, & Forster, 2011). In the present experiments, we examined masked TL priming effects with primes and targets presented in 3 different text orientations (e.g., 0°, as well as 90° and 180° rotations). Results revealed that the magnitude of the TL priming effect with native English readers was equivalent for stimuli presented in these three orientations, providing support for abstract letter unit accounts of orthographic coding. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Early Brain Damage Affects Body Schema and Person Perception Abilities in Children and Adolescents with Spastic Diplegia.

Early brain damage leading to cerebral palsy is associated to core motor impairments and also affects cognitive and social abilities. In particular, previous studies have documented specific alterations of perceptual body processing and motor cognition that are associated to unilateral motor deficits in hemiplegic patients. However, little is known about spastic diplegia (SpD), which is characterized by motorial deficits involving both sides of the body and is often associated to visuospatial, attentional, and social perception impairments. Here, we compared the performance of a sample of 30 children and adolescents with SpD (aged 7-18 years) and of a group of age-matched controls with typical development (TD) at two different tasks tapping on body representations. In the first task, we tested visual and motor imagery abilities as assessed, respectively, by the object-based mental rotation of letters and by the first-person transformations for whole-body stimuli. In the second task, we administered an inversion effect/composite illusion task to evaluate the use of configural/holistic processing of others' body. Additionally, we assessed social perception abilities in the SpD sample using the NEPSY-II battery. In line with previously reported visuospatial deficits, a general mental imagery impairment was found in SpD patients when they were engaged in both object-centered and first-person mental transformations. Nevertheless, a specific deficit in operating an own-body transformation emerged. As concerns body perception, while more basic configural processing (i.e., inversion effect) was spared, no evidence for holistic (i.e., composite illusion) body processing was found in the SpD group. NEPSY-II assessment revealed that SpD children were impaired in both the theory of mind and affect recognition subtests. Overall, these findings suggested that early brain lesions and biased embodied experience could affect higher-level motor cognition and perceptual body processing, thus pointing to a strict link between motor deficits, body schema alterations, and person processing difficulties.

Age-associated delay in mental rotation.

Age-associated slowing in mental rotation (MR) process has been documented in the literature. Particularly, the intercept of the response times function of rotation angle has been consistently found to be larger in older than in younger adults. However, the intercept represents the speed of response in 2 distinct subprocesses of MR: the initial phase of stimulus encoding and the final phase of response selection and execution. Thus, it remains unclear which of these 2 subprocesses of MR is affected by age. To investigate this, we recorded event-related potentials in younger and older individuals during a letter rotation task. The onset of the rotation-related negativity (RRN), the electrophysiological correlate of MR, was delayed in older (n = 20; mean age = 20.1) as compared to younger participants (n = 20, mean age = 73.4). Consistent with this observation, additional analyses revealed that the RRN amplitude was modulated by rotation angle between 350 and 500 ms poststimulus in younger adults (n = 26, mean age = 21.0), while this modulation only emerged in the later time window (500-650 ms) in older participants (n = 26; mean age = 73.6). These results suggest that MR occurs later in older adults and demonstrate that the initial phase before MR proper is one source of the age-related slowing observed in MR tasks. Possible accounts for this age-associated delay include a prolonged phase of stimulus encoding and/or selective difficulties in directing attention away from the external stimulus toward its internal mental representation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Mental Rotation of Pictures, Letters and Symbols in Children with Dyslexia: Evidence for Stimulus Type Effect

ABSTRACT We report the results of three tasks of two-dimensional pictures, letters and symbols mental rotation (MR) among 9–11 years aged Arabic readers with dyslexia, in order to examine a potential stimulus type effect on MR ability in terms of accuracy and speed. Results showed that readers with dyslexia (n = 32) performed significantly lower and were slower than typical readers (n = 44) in the three MR tasks. Furthermore, ‘group’ and ‘type of stimuli’ effects were obtained for accuracy and speed of MR implementation, indicating impaired visual spatial orientation processing in children with dyslexia. Furthermore, repeated measures of ANOVA showed that letter MR is significantly slower than pictures and symbols in dyslexic group but no difference in terms of accuracy. These results are interpreted as support for the notion of linguistic based mental rotation impairment in developmental dyslexia, without being restricted to orthographic material.

Reading sentences of words with rotated letters: An eye movement study

Participants' eye movements were measured as they read sentences in which individual letters within words were rotated. Both the consistency of direction and the magnitude of rotation were manipulated (letters rotated all in the same direction, or alternately clockwise and anti-clockwise, by 30° or 60°). Each sentence included a target word that was manipulated for frequency of occurrence. Our objectives were threefold: To quantify how change in the visual presentation of individual letters disrupted word identification, and whether disruption was consistent with systematic change in visual presentation; to determine whether inconsistent letter transformation caused more disruption than consistent letter transformation; and to determine whether such effects were comparable for words that were high and low frequency to explore the extent to which they were visually or linguistically mediated. We found that disruption to reading was greater as the magnitude of letter rotation increased, although even small rotations affected processing. The data also showed that alternating letter rotations were significantly more disruptive than consistent rotations; this result is consistent with models of lexical identification in which encoding occurs over units of more than one adjacent letter. These rotation manipulations also showed significant interactions with word frequency on the target word: Gaze durations and total fixation duration times increased disproportionately for low-frequency words when they were presented at more extreme rotations. These data provide a first step towards quantifying the relative contribution of the spatial relationships between individual letters to word recognition and eye movement control in reading.

Does letter rotation slow down orthographic processing in word recognition?

Leading neural models of visual word recognition assume that letter rotation slows down the conversion of the visual input to a stable orthographic representation (e.g., local detectors combination model; Dehaene, Cohen, Sigman, & Vinckier, 2005, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 9, 335-341). If this premise is true, briefly presented rotated primes should be less effective at activating word representations than those primes with upright letters. To test this question, we conducted a masked priming lexical decision experiment with vertically presented words either rotated 90° or in marquee format (i.e., vertically but with upright letters). We examined the impact of the format on both letter identity (masked identity priming: identity vs. unrelated) and letter position (masked transposed-letter priming: transposed-letter prime vs. replacement-letter prime). Results revealed sizeable masked identity and transposed-letter priming effects that were similar in magnitude for rotated and marquee words. Therefore, the reading cost from letter rotation does not arise in the initial access to orthographic/lexical representations.

Eudora Welty House and Garden

Eudora Welty House and Garden Bridget Edwards, Director April of 2016 marked the tenth anniversary of the public opening of the Eudora Welty House, renamed the Eudora Welty House and Garden (EWHG) in 2013. We celebrated this milestone with a week of special events. We launched it with the inauguration of Second Saturday open hours and a talk by long-time Welty friend Patti Carr Black. Black discussed the curation of her 1995 exhibit, "Other Places," which highlights twenty of Welty's 1930s photographs of New Orleans and New York City, Welty's two other beloved cities outside of Jackson. This exhibit was on display in the Education and Visitors Center during 2016. Maggie Stevenson took the lead in orchestrating our second "pop-up" art exhibit, which presented Welty-themed work done by Mississippi artists. We hosted the Scholastic Writing Awards ceremony on a Sunday, which was sponsored by the Eudora Welty Foundation, and opened the Welty House for tours to student winners, their families, and teachers. The week also included our annual celebration of Welty's birthday on April 13, which was held in conjunction with our spring plant sale. Over nine hundred people visited the EWHG during the anniversary week. We enthusiastically stretched ourselves in a new direction last year with "Jane Austen in the Eudora Welty Garden." This was our first mini-film series, and it was held in the Camelia Room of the Welty garden. Independent scholar Carolyn Brown proposed the idea in the fall of 2015 and served as the content specialist for the three-part series that aimed to combine Welty's love of Austen's fiction, cinema, and good times in the garden! Emma, Pride and Prejudice (the Keira Knightley version), and the Bollywoood adaptation of the latter, Bride and Prejudice, were shown over three Friday nights in May, September, and October. I served as the [End Page 126] lead staff member on this project, done in partnership with Jackson-based Crossroads Film Society and the Mississippi regional chapter of the Jane Austen Society of North America (MS-JASNA). The series was funded by a grant from the Mississippi Humanities Council with assistance from MS-JASNA. The Museum Division of the Mississippi Department of Archives and History contributed marketing and technical assistance as well as funds to provide moviegoers with popcorn and lemonade. Dr. Brown spoke at each screening and distributed handouts highlighting Welty's connections to each film. The weather cooperated nicely, and the series was a robust success, drawing just under four hundred moviegoers. We hope to do it again in the fall of 2017. The series was especially successful in drawing younger people to the site and noticeably increased our Facebook "likes"! Education and Outreach Specialist Isabel Gray accomplished a great deal this year, starting with the completion of the EWHG's first Educator's Field Trip Guide for teachers. The guide is 25 pages and includes information for planning a trip, the history of the house and garden, a Welty family timeline, curricular connections showing how a trip meshes with state educational standards across a variety of disciplines, resources for teachers before and after a visit, games, and a host of other activities. Gray's excellent work was fittingly praised by many in the Department. The guide can be found at www.mdah.ms.gov/welty/resources. Gray also curated her first exhibit, which opened to the public in mid-February. Dear Miss Welty: A Rotating Selection of Correspondence is drawn from "fan mail" found in the Welty Collection at the Archives. She chose a wonderfully diverse selection of letters and telegrams to scan and display, ranging from notes by Presidents John Kennedy and Bill Clinton to a 1983 letter by an eight-year-old girl from San Francisco beseeching Welty's understanding and friendship as they endured their common predicament of having such an unusual name. The famed 1943 letter to Welty from William Faulkner is also on display. Gray is currently choosing the next rotation of letters; they will highlight correspondence relating to life in Jackson and area friends and fans. We continue with our quarterly book signings and readings, a collaboration with Lemuria Books. We had...