The Complexity of Reading Revealed by a Study with Healthy Older Adults.

Aging, even when healthy, involves changes in cognitive functioning that can gradually affect the everyday activities and well-being of older people. Reading, which requires the integrity of several functions and their integration, is important to maintaining high cognitive and emotional stimulation over time. Our study aimed to investigate whether reading ability declines with aging.

Global and Local Processing of Letters and Faces: The Role of Visual Focal Attention.

Studies in the literature have shown how the preference towards local or global processing can vary according to different characteristics of the stimuli involved, such as stimulus type and stimulus time duration. In the present study, we investigated whether letters and faces undergo similar or different global/local processing and the attentional mechanisms that might be linked to eventual differences. We used hierarchical, congruent, and incongruent letters and faces in different time conditions (180 and 500 ms) and we conducted three different experiments.

The Timing of Semantic Processing in the Parafovea: Evidence from a Rapid Parallel Visual Presentation Study.

In the present investigation we adopted the Rapid Parallel Visual Presentation Paradigm with the aim of studying the timing of parafoveal semantic processing. The paradigm consisted in the simultaneous presentation of couple of words, one in fovea (W1) and one in parafovea (W2). In three experiments, we manipulated word frequency, semantic relatedness between the two words and the effect of stimulus duration (150, 100, 50 ms).

Consecutive and temporally distant perseverations after right brain damage: A prospective study.

Right brain-damaged patients may show omissions and/or additional marks in target cancellation. The latter is classified as perseverative behavior and has been attributed to defective response inhibition or attentional disengagement deficit. This study aimed at (a) verifying that consecutive (immediate) and return (temporally distant) motor perseverations could be due to different mechanisms; (b) investigating the relationships among different types of perseveration (e.

The Focal Attention Window Size Explains Letter Substitution Errors in Reading.

Acquired Neglect Dyslexia is often associated with right-hemisphere brain damage and is mainly characterized by omissions and substitutions in reading single words. Martelli et al. proposed in 2011 that these two types of error are due to different mechanisms.