In any visual search task in the lab or in the world, observers will make errors. Those errors can be categorized as "deterministic": If you miss this target in this display once, you will definitely miss it again. Alternatively, errors can be "stochastic", occurring randomly with some probability from trial to trial.…

Numbers and letters are culturally created symbols that acquire meaning through extensive training, significantly influencing brain function. The distinct hemispheric specialization of cortical regions for these categories has been hypothesized to relate to the co-activated brain networks: the left language regions for letters, and the right…

The visual system is tuned by its inputs. The behavior of reading offers a unique way to examine tuning for visual representations (letters) because readers have massive experience recognizing letters in a systematic context (reading). One aspect of reading is that letters are highly crowded within words, which severely limits their…

Background: Visual attention span (VAS) refers to the number of visual elements processed simultaneously in a multielement array. Yet, there are mixed findings regarding VAS deficit in developmental dyslexia (DD) across different tasks, stimuli, languages, control groups, and ages. Aim: The present meta-analysis aimed to investigate VAS deficit in…

During the last decades, prevalence of pupils with Specific Learning Disorder, and more specifically with Dyslexia, is on the increase in Italian schools. It requires both researchers and teachers to investigate, adapt and adopt simplex teaching strategies. that may foster pupils learning process at primary schools by taking account of their…

Soares, Lages, Oliveira, and Cabrera-Hernández (2019) recently showed that the mirror-letter interference effect observed for words containing reversal letters was reliable for words containing left-oriented mirror-letters as 'd', but not for words containing right-oriented mirror-letters as 'b', thus indicating that the directionality of the…

The writing system -- the transparency of orthography in alphabet-based systems and differences between logographic and phonetic-based systems -- can affect the efficiency of inferential word learning when words are introduced visually. It can also shape how people self-evaluate their learning success (we refer to such type of self-evaluation as…

Findings from Navon letters paradigm studies among individuals with autism spectrum disorder are inconsistent. The different results are often being interpreted in terms of "local bias" and/or "global weakness," according to the predictions of leading theories such as the "weak central coherence" or the "enhanced…

Visual word recognition is facilitated by the presence of "orthographic neighbors" that mismatch the target word by a single letter substitution. However, researchers typically do not consider "where" neighbors mismatch the target. In light of evidence that some letter positions are more informative than others, we investigate…

This study explored whether the color of letters could influence letter discrimination task performances and whether this effect of color could be modulated by processing level (global vs. local) and attention level of color (color-attended vs. color-unattended). We used the Navon letters in red, green, or white as stimuli at a relatively small…

Using Chinese characters, we investigated how stroke count and frequency of use influence attention and short-term memory (STM) encoding in Mainland Chinese speakers. To isolate specific components of attention we employed the Theory of Visual Attention (TVA), which allowed estimates of STM capacity, processing speed, and the threshold of visual…

Visual working memory (VWM) is limited in both the "capacity" of information it can retain and the "rate" at which it encodes that information. We examined the influence of stimulus complexity on these 2 limitations of VWM. Observers performed a change-detection task with English letters of various fonts or letters from…

In four experiments, we investigated the impact of letter case (lower case vs. UPPER CASE) on the processing of sequences of written words. Experiment 1 used the rapid parallel visual presentation (RPVP) paradigm with postcued identification of one word in a five-word sequence. The sequence could be grammatically correct (e.g., "the boy likes…

The same-different task is a classic paradigm that requires participants to judge whether two successively presented stimuli are the same or different. While this task is simple, with results that have been replicated many times, response times (RTs) and accuracy for both same and different decisions remain difficult to model. The biggest obstacle…

The goal of the paper was to investigate whether morphological units -- stems and suffixes -- influence orthographic processing by modulating visual attention demands to the task. Orthographic processing was measured with a visual one-back task requiring letters to be detected within pseudowords not including stems/suffixes, or containing real…