The relationship between visual acuity and conceptual tempo

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between visual acuity and the two components of conceptual tempo, response accuracy and response latency. Subjects were chosen at random. Each subject was then administered a test of conceptual tempo, the Matching Familiar Figures Test (MFFT) and a test of visual acuity, the Snellen. The only significant relationship found was that between response accuracy and near visual acuity. Subjects with superior visual acuity made significantly fewer errors than did those with average or inferior acuity. It was concluded that visual acuity is an important determinant of MFFT performance. Based on these results, it was recommended that further research examine the relationship between visual acuity and other psychometric measures containing a visual component.

A comparison of modality effect performance in children: how reading achievement performance is influenced by echoic memory

This study investigates if less skilled readers suffer from deficits in echoic memory, which may be responsible for limiting the progress of reading acquisition. Serial recall performance in auditory, visual, and noisy conditions was used to assess echoic memory differences between skilled and less skilled readers. Both groups showed the typical modality effect, demonstrating that each had a functioning echoic memory. Less skilled readers performed more weakly than skilled readers on noisy serial recall, suggesting that the recall of less skilled readers is more vulnerable to interference than the recall of skilled readers. Nonword repetition performance indicated that all participants had reduced recall as a function of word complexity and word length. No difference between reading groups was found on this task; however, as nonword repetition and size of modality effect did not correlate, this task may not be a measure of echoic memory.