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Rebecca Oliver
James Madison University

Subject Listing - Psychology
Advisor: Dr. Jeff Andre

Thursday, Oral Session 1, Presentation 5, Carmichael Hall 131

HEIRACHAL INFORMATION PROCESSING IN DYSLEIXIA: VISUAL PERSISTENCE AND PROCESSING SPEED OF LOCAL AND GLOBAL STIMULI

The purpose of this investigation is to test whether adults who have been diagnosed with a specific reading disability, that is dyslexia, will perform differently than adults with normal reading capabilities on tasks of visual processing. Previous research suggests that the dyslexic visual system may take an unusually long period of time to recover from the aftereffects of neural activity caused by a stimulus and is therefore, less able to process information in sequence. Accordingly, two tasks will be employed to test the initial stages in visual processing. One task, temporal integration, will assess lengths of visible persistence. Another task, backward masking, will evaluate speeds of processing. Both tasks will be carried out under conditions that test the processing of global and local information. These tasks will involve the rapid presentation of stimuli on a computer screen followed by discrete measure of local or global discrimination success. Continuous dependent variables that will be measured are reaction time and accuracy. It is hypothesized that dyslexics will perform worse than normal readers under all conditions that pertain to local information processing but that their performance will not significantly differ under conditions involving global processing.

Advisor: Dr. Jeff Andre, Associate Professor, Department of Psychology, James Madison University, Harrisonburg, Va