Year: 2005
Type: other
Abstract: This thesis explores the very mental flow in your brain as your eyes cascade along these printed words: The cognitive dynamics of visual word perception.The object was to reveal what actually takes place in our mind during the split second we perceive a written word.Like in many other studies of reading, the focus here is on the visual perception of isolated words.It is widely acknowledged that asking how single words are processed is central to understanding reading, and over the past two decades it has been a major focus of research in one of the most exciting fields of cognitive psychology.Word reading is an extraordinary cognitive ability.The moment a printed word leaps into our brain, a magnificent piece of machinery is launched that operates both fast and accurately.Indeed, readers make rather short work of written words.To process a word only takes tenths of a second, which allows a skilled reader to digest words at a staggering rate of five words per second or more.To give you an impression, by the time you finish this sentence the current page already plunged 209 words into your head, and for those who will reach the final page of this thesis, it will be 90,000 more.As easy as reading may seem, investigating it certainly is not, for we are dealing with an intricate process.Indeed, one may easily fail to appreciate its true complexity: More than a century of profound scientific inquiry has produced countless interesting facts and theories but, even today, many issues remain unsolved.Nevertheless, a great deal has been learned in the past decades and most researchers working in the field now agree on the basic tenets of visual word processing.One widely accepted point of view asserts that the dynamics of word perception entail complicated interactions among dimensions of orthography, phonology, and meaning, which exemplifies a complex cognitive system.The dynamics of cognitive systems, however, are hard to track in the anatomy of the living brain, even with contemporary imaging techniques such as computerized axial tomography or magnetic resonance imaging.Fortunately, the branch of experimental psychology yields simple but effective tools with which we can obtain a detailed impression of our mental flow.In the present research, we used a new experimental task to investigate visual word processing.Under controlled laboratory conditions, our research participants were presented with multiple series of experimental trials.In each trial, a printed word was shown on a computer screen, and simultaneously part of a spoken word was played over a headphone.The task of the participants was to decide quickly in each trial whether the visual and auditory stimuli were consistent with one another.The response was recorded, measuring both accuracy and response time.In this study, many thousands of responses were collected (in fact as many as there are words in this thesis), and together they enlighten us about a grand mystery: How our brain succeeds in converting a printed word into a coherent language experience.Many persons contributed to this project.First, I would like to express my gratitude to my supervisors, Annette de Groot and Anny Bosman.They granted me complete freedom in pursuing my idiosyncratic ideas on visual word processing and in the way these ideas were translated into a research project.Their continuous support in this has been a real privilege, and I am very grateful for that.Special thanks go to Anny, for convincing me many years ago that I could actually be a researcher.In the final phase of this project, Annette de Groot and Anny Bosman provided invaluable comments on preliminary versions of the manuscript.These were always detailed and insightful, and led to many improvements.Furthermore, their positive attitude towards my decision to drastically cut down working time after my children were born was tremendous, and it still means a great deal to me.It was very rewarding to work on my dissertation and at the same time be able to spend so much time with my two precious children.For that I also want to thank the Department of Psychology of the University of Amsterdam for its cutting-edge policy on parenthood leaves.I wish that more institutions would allow their workers to spend quantity time with their children.The Psychonomy Section was a stimulating place to work at.I would like to thank all my colleges for their technical and mental support, especially my roommate Bjørn Dekker.He was the key to all my Macintosh related inquiries and was always willing to here out my lectures on confidence intervals, or any other kind of account.
Author: Meike van Leerdam
Language: English
Subfield: Developmental and Educational Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
Funder: Universiteit van Amsterdam
OpenAlex ID: W47705034