Psychology Commons^™

Dyslexia And Configural Perception Of Character Sequences, Joseph W. Houpt, Bethany L. Sussman, James T. Townsend, Sharlene D. Newman

Psychology Faculty Publications

Developmental dyslexia is a complex and heterogeneous disorder characterized by unexpected difficulty in learning to read. Although it is considered to be biologically based, the degree of variation has made the nature and locus of dyslexia difficult to ascertain. Hypotheses regarding the cause have ranged from low-level perceptual deficits to higher order cognitive deficits, such as phonological processing and visual-spatial attention. We applied the capacity coefficient, a measure obtained from a mathematical cognitive model of response times to measure how efficiently participants processed different classes of stimuli. The capacity coefficient was used to test the extent to which individuals with …