Because of their value as a socially communicative cue, researchers have strived to understand how the gaze of other people influences a variety of cognitive processes. Recent work in social attention suggests that the use of images of people in laboratory studies, as a substitute for real people, may not effectively test socially communicative aspects of eye gaze. As attention affects many other cognitive processes, it is likely that social attention between real individuals could also affect other cognitive processes, such as memory.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFResponse time (RT) is facilitated when a target appears at a cued (valid) location versus an uncued (invalid) location. Interestingly, this valid-versus-invalid RT difference increases as the percentage of valid trials increases. In the present study, we investigated the mechanism responsible for this proportion valid cueing effect (PVE).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Exp Psychol Learn Mem Cogn
November 2011
Reading is acutely sensitive to the amount of space between letters within a string. In the present investigation, we explore the impairment caused by increasing interletter spacing when reading single words and nonwords aloud. Specifically, 2 hypotheses are tested: (a) whether increasing interletter spacing induces serial processing while reading aloud and (b) whether this serial processing results from an increased reliance on a serial sublexical mechanism similar to that implemented in dual route models of reading.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn four experiments, we investigated the effect of deleting specific features of letters on letter and word recognition in the context of reading aloud. Experiments 1 and 2 assessed the relative importance of vertices versus midsegments in letter recognition. Experiments 3 and 4 tested the relative importance of vertices versus midsegments in word recognition.
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