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<p>The ability to rapidly and continuously update phonological representations is critical to skilled reading. Denkla and Rudel (1976) first reported Rapid Naming impairments in poor readers, leading to a wide body of evidence supporting the Rapid Naming task as a reliable predictor of reading success. Despite a well-established correlation between Rapid Naming performance and reading achievement, the factors driving this relationship remain unclear. The present study was an exploratory investigation of the role of articulatory planning in Rapid Naming performance. Specifically, we explored the effects of phonological similarity and word length of the items to-be-named in the Rapid Naming task. Naming times were measured in 30 Undergraduate students with typical reading ability, and 10 poor reading high school students completing the standard Rapid Naming task, as well tasks manipulated for phonological similarity and word length. The results showed that phonologically similar words generated significantly longer naming times than the standard Rapid Naming task for both typical and poor readers. This finding suggests that when phonological representations are similar, it creates competition for the rapid updating of representations during motor planning for naming. Additionally, 3-syllable items for typical readers and 2-and 3-syllable items for poor readers produced significantly longer naming times than the standard Rapid Naming task, suggesting that larger phonological representations also create competition in motor planning. The results of the preset study suggest that phonological similarity and word length have a similar influence on Rapid Naming ability in typical and poor readers.</p> / Master of Science (MSc)

Several recent studies show that previous experience can influence observers’ search strategy in a way that improves search performance. The purpose of the present study is to investigate how the experience of difficult color discriminability affects search strategies. Two participant groups either experienced difficult color discriminability in a half of the trials (i.e., hard-discrimination group) or experienced easy search in all trials (i.e., easy-discrimination group) in a dual-target search task. Participants were required to respond to the presence of a target (colored T) among distractors (colored pseudo-L). Eye movements were recorded to understand which feature information is used to guide attention, and behavioral performance was measured to compare search efficiency between the two groups. The hard-discrimination group fixated more distractors with target-dissimilar colors than the easy-discrimination group, suggesting the hard-discrimination group used shape information to guide search more than the easy-discrimination group. However, error rates and response times were not significantly different between groups. The results demonstrate that the experience of difficult color discriminability discourages observers from guiding attention by color, and encourages them to use shape information.

Recollection is a pattern completion process that enables retrieval of arbitrarily associated information following minimal study. These attributes enable recollection to support retrieval of many kinds of mnemonic representations, from highly associative contextual information to very specific low-level representations. However, recollection is typically studied in the context of declarative memory tasks, in which participants exhibit recollection by explicitly reporting on the recollected information. Is it the case that recollection is limited to declarable representations, or is it a more general process that occurs for any representation? Two experiments and a novel analysis technique are presented to answer this question. The results suggest that recollection is not limited to declarable representations. These results argue against theories of recognition memory that restrict the representational input allowed to mnemonic processes; mnemonic processes in general may act on arbitrary representations.