The attentional blink is related to phonemic decoding, but not sight-word recognition, in typically reading adults

The effect of attention shifting on Chinese children's word reading in primary school

BACKGROUND

This study explored the effects of attention shifting on Chinese children's word reading.

OBJECTIVE

The sample consisted of 87 fourth-grade children from Shaoxing City, China.

METHODS

The students completed measures of the attention shifting task, reading accuracy test, reading fluency test, and rapid automatized naming test.

RESULTS

The results showed that reading fluency was significantly correlated with attention shifting scores, specifically with tag1 and tag6 (ps < 0.05). The reading accuracy score was also significantly correlated with tag6 (p < 0.05). According to the regression analysis of attention shifting on word reading, even when controlling for rapid automatic naming, attention shifting significantly affected word reading fluency at approximately 600 ms (p = .011). Attention shifting did not affect children's word reading accuracy.

SHORT CONCLUSION

These findings suggest that attention shifting is significantly associated with children's word reading. Educators should focus on developing children's attention shifting to improve their word reading ability.

Inverted, Upright, and Blurred Faces Are Not Immune to the Attentional Blink

While a robust Attentional Blink (AB) occurs for letters, digits, and objects, the evidence is mixed for face targets. The multiple channel hypothesis posits that both configural and featural channels operate for faces during an AB task and each channel has its own resource limitations. Consequently, if Target 1 (T1) only occupies one channel then Target 2 (T2) is processed via the other channel avoiding the AB. Three experiments employed a two-target-mask paradigm to examine the multiple channel hypothesis by varying the featural and configural processing requirements of T1 and T2 faces. Experiment 1 used clear upright and clear inverted faces, and Experiment 2 used blurred upright and clear inverted faces, to engage configural and featural processing, respectively. Experiment 3 centrally presented blurred upright and clear inverted faces to ensure that the results of the prior experiments could not be attributed to spatial shifts of attention to the target positions. Contrary to the multiple channel hypothesis, the results of all three experiments showed an AB for all conditions regardless of the T1 and T2 faces engaging the same or different processing channels. This study showed that faces suffer from the same processing impairments as other categories of targets during the AB.