Pablo Gomez

Articles are fundamental building blocks of many languages, particularly those that are members of the Indo-European family. Articles belong to the syntactic category of determiners and are commonl...

Braille is a tactile writing system that enables individuals to read through the sense of touch. Although letter recognition research in the visual modality has informed reading instruction debates, the processes underlying braille letter recognition have received comparatively less attention which has led to little input from researchers toward educators. In this study, we first quantified the formal properties of braille dots using measures of cue validity and entropy-based informativeness, and we tested whether the 26 letters of the braille alphabet were linearly separable in the six-dimensional binary space defined by dot presence. We then examined letter discriminability in fluent Spanish braille readers using a same–different task that included all possible letter combinations. From participants’ accuracy and response time data, we constructed perceptual similarity matrices and applied hierarchical clustering to characterize the structure of braille letter similarity. The resulting clusters revealed a structured perceptual space that reflected both local dot features and global configurations. These results provide a characterization of the perceptual structure of the braille alphabet and show constraints on tactile letter recognition that extend beyond dot overlap, offering a benchmark to guide experimental control, instructional sequencing of letters, and computational models of tactile letter recognition.

Perceptual disfluency, induced by blurring or difficult-to-read typefaces, can sometimes enhance memory retention, but the underlying mechanisms remain unclear. To investigate this effect, we manipulated blurring levels (clear, low blur, high blur) during encoding and assessed recognition performance in a surprise memory test. In Experiments 1A and 1B, response latencies from a lexical decision task were analyzed using ex-Gaussian distribution modeling and drift diffusion modeling. Results showed that blurring differentially influenced parameters of the model, with high blur affecting both early and late-stage processes, while low blur primarily influenced early-stage processes. Recognition test results further revealed that high blur words were remembered better than both clear and low blurred words. Experiment 2 employed a semantic categorization task with word frequency manipulation to further examine the locus of the perceptual disfluency effect. Similar to Experiments 1A and 1B, high blur influenced both early and late-stage processes, while low blur primarily affected early-stage processes. Low-frequency words exhibited greater shifting and skewing in distributional parameters, yet only high-frequency, highly blurred words demonstrated an enhanced memory effect. These findings suggest that both early and late cognitive processes contribute to the mnemonic benefits associated with perceptual disfluency. Overall, this study demonstrates that distributional and computational analyses provide powerful tools for dissecting encoding mechanisms and their effects on memory, offering valuable insights into models of perceptual disfluency

Perceptual disfluency, induced by blurring or difficult-to-read typefaces, can sometimes enhance memory retention, but the underlying mechanisms remain unclear. To investigate this effect, we manipulated blurring levels (clear, low-blur, high-blur) during encoding and assessed recognition performance in a surprise memory test. In Experiments 1A and 1B, response latencies from a lexical decision task were analyzed using ex-Gaussian distribution modeling and supplemented by drift diffusion modeling. Results showed that blurring differentially influenced parameters of the model, with high-blur affecting both early and late-stage processes, while low-blur primarily influenced early-stage processes. Recognition test results further revealed that high-blur words were remembered better than both clear and low-blurred words. Experiment 2 employed a semantic categorization task with a word frequency manipulation to further examine the locus of the perceptual disfluency effect. Similar to Experiments 1A and 1B, high-blur influenced both early and late-stage processes, while low-blur primarily affected early-stage processes. Low-frequency words exhibited greater shifting and skewing in distributional parameters, yet only high-frequency, highly blurred words demonstrated an enhanced memory effect. These findings suggest that both early and late cognitive processes contribute to the mnemonic benefits associated with perceptual disfluency. Overall, this study demonstrates that distributional and computational analyses provide powerful tools for dissecting encoding mechanisms and their effects on memory, offering valuable insights into models of perceptual disfluency.

Response times (RTs) are a ubiquitous variable for assessing cognitive and motor processes. However, variability introduced by keyboards, especially in onl

Reading words in alphabetic scripts requires encoding the relative order of the letters. This process of letter position coding is known to be flexible. For instance, the masked transposed-letter prime jugde activates the word JUDGE to a greater degree than a replacement-letter prime like jupte, a phenomenon known as the transposed-letter effect. In this study, we investigated whether the transposed-letter effect in masked priming is related to reading skills (as measured by a standardized reading test) in a sample of sixth-grade children. Targets (e.g., RITME: Catalan for rhythm) were preceded by identity primes (ritme), transposed-letter primes (rimte), or replacement-letter primes (risle) in a sandwich priming paradigm. Results showed that transposed-letter primes were more effective than replacement-letter primes but less effective than identity primes. More importantly, while the readers’ reading skills modulated overall latency and accuracy, we found no evidence that the participants’ reading skill modulated the size of the priming effects. This outcome prompted us to re-analyze analogous conditions in a masked priming mega-study with approximately 1000 adult participants (Adelman et al. Behav Res Methods 46(4):1052–1067, 2014), where we found a near-zero correlation between the size of transposed-letter priming and spelling and vocabulary tests. These findings suggest that if there are individual differences in the first moments of word processing, these are not detectable for neurotypical readers in laboratory tasks.