Cognitive Lunch Abstract for February 25

The next Cognitive Lunch will be held Wednesday, February 25.
Time: 12:10-1:10 p.m.
Place: Psychology Conference Room (Room 128)

"Measuring Visual Word Processing Efficiency" will be presented by Joe Houpt, Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Indiana University.

Abstract:
Visual word perception is a fundamental part of reading and as such has been the focus of much attention in cognitive psychology. Many of the most influential studies of word perception have focused on the efficiency of word perception, but have used different baselines of comparison. This inconsistency has led to diverging models of visual word perception. In this paper we use the workload capacity coefficient measure of efficiency to address this inconsistency. This measure has the advantage of using the predicted performance of a standard processing model as a baseline. Based on these analyses, we find evidence higher efficiency in word processing than the baseline model, as well as better than non-words and upside-down non-words. Some participants showed increased efficiency for pseudoword processing, although the effect was not as regular as the word processing efficiency.