RT Journal Article
A1 Schneps, Matthew H.
A1 Brockmole, James
A1 Heffner-Wong, Amanda
A1 Pomplun, Marc
A1 Hwang, Alex D.
A1 Sonnert, Gerhard
T1 The Role of Gist in Dyslexia
JF Journal of Vision
JO Journal of Vision
YR 2010
DO 10.1167/10.7.1134
VO 10
IS 7
SP 1134
OP 1134
SN 1534-7362
AB  Dyslexia, a neurological condition that impairs reading, has been associated with advantages for rapid processing in the peripheral visual field (Geiger and Lettvin, 1987; Facoetti, et al, 2000; von Karolyi, et al 2003; Schneps, et al, 2010, in preparation) suggesting enhanced sensitivity to visual gist (Oliva, 2005) in this group. Sensitivities to peripheral gist might be expected to contribute to spatial learning, and Howard et al., (2006) and Schneps, et al., (2010) used the contextual cueing (CC) paradigm of Chun & Jiang (1998) to measure this in those with dyslexia. They found that while people with dyslexia are initially slower than controls at visual search, they are able to effectively improve the efficiency of their search through spatial learning, so that the search times of those with dyslexia become comparable to the controls. Spatial learning in the traditional CC task is dictated by the configuration of cues nearest the target (Brady & Chun, 2005), making scant use of peripheral gist. However, if the task is modified to provide stronger peripheral cues in the gist, we might expect those with dyslexia can outperform controls on searches involving learned configurations. To test this hypothesis, we compared a group of college students with dyslexia against controls using three variants of the CC task: (1) a traditional CC paradigm using L shapes for cues; (2) a variant using realistic scenes for cues (Brockmole & Henderson, 2006); and (3) a new task that uses a context defined by low spatial frequency gist. Our hypothesis is that spatial learning will improve in those with dyslexia compared to controls as the role of gist successively increased in each task. Here, we report preliminary findings from this study.
RD 3/7/2021
UL https://doi.org/10.1167/10.7.1134