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Inducing pure alexia in healthy adults

Daniel J. Roberts1*, Filipe Cristino2, Josh S. Payne2, Luke T. Kendrick3 and Marie-Josephe Tainturier2
  • 1 Liverpool John Moores University, Research Centre in Brain and Behaviour, United Kingdom
  • 2 Bangor University, School of Psychology, United Kingdom
  • 3 University of Reading, School of Psychology, United Kingdom

Pure alexia (PA) is an acquired language disorder characterised by effects of word length on reading times and by an overt/covert letter-by-letter reading strategy. One account suggests the deficit is underpinned by an inability to process medium-high spatial frequencies (SF) that are optimal for processing complex and highly confusable visual stimuli such as written words, pictures of living items and faces [1-6]. Words, for instance, are a small and easily confusable set of symbols. Living things have similar overall shapes and share many constituent features which make them difficult to differentiate when compared to non-living things. Consistent with this account PA patients are often slow and effortful in identification of these stimuli and show a deficit in medium-high SF processing. The aim of this study is to test if the visual impairment in PA can be induced in healthy adults by filtering out the band of SFs hypothesised to underpin the deficit [7-9]. All participants (N=30) had normal or corrected vision, were native English speakers, and had no history of developmental or neurological disorders. Two tasks were adapted from previous work by Roberts and colleagues [3, 10]: reading (manipulates word length) and object naming (manipulates category and visual similarity), both of which are striclty matched on various psycholinguistic variables. All tasks were administered using E-prime software [11], with accuracy and reaction time recorded. The hypothesis is that under SF filtered conditions we will observe (1) a word-length effect and (2) a living

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Keywords: pure alexia, visual word form area, fusiform gyrus, spatial frequency, semantics

Conference: 54th Annual Academy of Aphasia Meeting, Llandudno, United Kingdom, 16 Oct - 18 Oct, 2016.

Presentation Type: Poster Sessions

Topic: Academy of Aphasia

Citation: Roberts DJ, Cristino F, Payne JS, Kendrick LT and Tainturier M (2016). Inducing pure alexia in healthy adults. Front. Psychol. Conference Abstract: 54th Annual Academy of Aphasia Meeting. doi: 10.3389/conf.fpsyg.2016.68.00062

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Received: 28 Apr 2016; Published Online: 15 Aug 2016.

* Correspondence: Dr. Daniel J Roberts, Liverpool John Moores University, Research Centre in Brain and Behaviour, Liverpool, United Kingdom, D.J.Roberts@liverpool.ac.uk