TY - GEN

T1 - Episodic memory cues in the acquisition of novel visual-phonological associations: a webcam-based eyetracking study

AU - Lira Calabrich, Simone

AU - Oppenheim, Gary

AU - Jones, Manon

N1 - Open Access statement This is an open access journal which means that all content is freely available without charge to the user or his/her institution. Users are allowed to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of the articles, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without asking prior permission from the publisher or the author .

PY - 2021

Y1 - 2021

N2 - When learning to bind visual symbols to sounds, to what extent do beginning readers track seemingly irrelevant information such as a symbol’s position within a visual display? In this study, we used adult typical readers’ own webcams to track their eye movements during a paired associate learning task that arbitrarily bound unfamiliar characters with monosyllabic pseudowords. Overall, participants’ error rate in recognition (Phase 1) decreased as a function of exposure, but was not modulated by the episodic memory-based effect of ‘looking-at-nothing’. Moreover, participants’ lowest error rate in both recognition and recall (Phases 1 and 2) was associated with item consistency across multiple exposures, in terms of spatial and contextual properties (i.e., stimulus’ screen location and co-occurrences with specific distractor items during encoding). Taken together, our findings suggest that normally developing readers extract statistical regularities in the input during visual-phonological associative learning, leading to rapid acquisition of these pre-orthographic representations.

AB - When learning to bind visual symbols to sounds, to what extent do beginning readers track seemingly irrelevant information such as a symbol’s position within a visual display? In this study, we used adult typical readers’ own webcams to track their eye movements during a paired associate learning task that arbitrarily bound unfamiliar characters with monosyllabic pseudowords. Overall, participants’ error rate in recognition (Phase 1) decreased as a function of exposure, but was not modulated by the episodic memory-based effect of ‘looking-at-nothing’. Moreover, participants’ lowest error rate in both recognition and recall (Phases 1 and 2) was associated with item consistency across multiple exposures, in terms of spatial and contextual properties (i.e., stimulus’ screen location and co-occurrences with specific distractor items during encoding). Taken together, our findings suggest that normally developing readers extract statistical regularities in the input during visual-phonological associative learning, leading to rapid acquisition of these pre-orthographic representations.

M3 - Conference contribution

VL - 43

SP - 2719

EP - 2725

BT - Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

T2 - 43rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society

Y2 - 27 July 2021 through 29 July 2021

ER -