Hide and seek: The relationship between visual search, word length effect and reading abilities.

Abstract

Objective: The objective of this study was to replicate earlier research findings that had indicated a relationship between visual search and reading problems. Dyslexic readers have been shown to perform worse on visual conjunction search tasks than on visual feature search tasks. Additionally, we examined the connection between a history of reading difficulties and the word length effect, which has been demonstrated in previous studies. We also assessed the relationship between visual conjunction search and the word length effect. Method: 60 people participated. All were undergraduate students or had completed their bachelor degree studies in the last two years before the study took place. The participants’ history of reading difficulties was assessed using The Adult Reading History Questionnaire (ARHQ). Visual conjunction search was measured using lines with a specific combination of orientation and brightness and visual feature search was measured using a similar task where the target differed from distractors on both feature dimensions (pop-out task). The word length effect was assessed with a lexical decision task using words and pseudowords. Results: The findings showed that there is a connection between a history of reading difficulties and the greater word length effect. However, with an increased set size, we were not able to find a connection between a greater difficulty with visual conjunction search and history of reading difficulties. No association was found between the word length effect and visual conjunction search. Conclusion: The sampling in the study could have affected the results. Individuals with reading difficulties who still attended university might have successfully trained the attentional mechanisms used in reading and visual search.