This paper presents an overview of evidence from psychological research, which enables us to understand the processes involved in word reading, how children develop word reading skills and how to teach them to read words successfully. Psychological models of reading in alphabetic orthographies propose two routes to word reading: an indirect route…

A large part of the empirical research in the field of visual attention has focused on various concrete paradigms. However, as yet, there has been no clear demonstration of whether or not these paradigms are indeed measuring the same underlying construct. We collected a very large data set (nearly 1.3 million trials) to address this question. We…

How are spatial and object attention coordinated to achieve rapid object learning and recognition during eye movement search? How do prefrontal priming and parietal spatial mechanisms interact to determine the reaction time costs of intra-object attention shifts, inter-object attention shifts, and shifts between visible objects and covertly cued…

The "other-race effect" (ORE), or the finding that same-race faces are better recognized than other-race faces, is one of the best replicated phenomena in face recognition. The current article reviews existing evidence and theory and proposes a new theoretical framework for the ORE, which argues that the effect results from a confluence of social…

Two theoretical models of visual attention and contingent learning were presented to provide a framework for the consideration of how observed individual differences in infant behavior may interact with nonsocial stimuli and caretaker-mediated stimuli to influence the individual's development of patterns of visual attention and contingency…

Much of what psychologists know about infant perception and cognition is based on habituation, but the process itself is still poorly understood. Here the authors offer a dynamic field model of infant visual habituation, which simulates the known features of habituation, including familiarity and novelty effects, stimulus intensity effects, and…

Although deficits in visual attention are often postulated as an important component of many declines in cognitive processing and functional outcomes in older adults, surprisingly little emphasis has been placed on evaluating psychometric instruments with which individual differences in visual attention ability can be assessed. This article…

Any theory of information processing must address both what is processed and how that processing takes place. Most studies investigating variables which alter physical dimension utilization have ignored the large individual differences in selective attention or cue utilization. A paradigm was developed using an individual focus on information…

Sex differences in cerebral organization and functioning, and the apparent superiority of males in spatial ability are examined in this paper. Attention is given to several kinds of cognitive and perceptual tasks in which sex differences in spatial ability have been shown to exist; among these are tasks involving: (1) recall and detection of…