Ryohei Nakayama

Research Associate, Graduate School of Humanities and Sociology, The University of Tokyo *Profile is at the time of the award.

2022Inamori Research GrantsHumanities & Sociology

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Research topics: A psychophysical study of visual motion processing as a basis for reading ability in Japanese

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Summary: The ability to read and comprehend text smoothly and correctly is unique to humans. In this ability, however, there are some abnormalities, such as dyslexia, and there are considerable individual differences even among normal subjects. Previous studies reported that reading ability in English is associated with performance in non-linguistic visual motion tasks. The present study investigates the role of visual motion processing in Japanese reading ability.

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I am grateful for receiving the Inamori Research Grant and determined to do my best to accomplish the research project.

Outline of Research Achievments

Reading written texts is a uniquely human cognitive function essential for social life. In this study, we investigated the relationship between visual information processing and Japanese reading ability to better understand the psychological foundations of reading ability. Psychophysical experiments were conducted to measure performance in three visual tasks: motion detection, speed discrimination, and attentional tracking. In addition, text reading speed, accuracy in detecting transposed letters within texts, and verbal IQ (using the Japanese Adult Reading Test) were measured in the same group of 46 participants. Correlation analyses revealed significant relationships between principal components derived from reading test scores and psychophysical performance on speed discrimination and attentional tracking tasks. These correlations remained significant even after controlling for participant age. Our findings are consistent with previous studies on English reading, suggesting that dynamic visual information processing, independent of language, is associated with reading ability. Furthermore, the observed relationships may stem from multiple orthogonal components of reading ability. For instance, letter-by-letter analysis, as reflected in transposed letter detection, and predictive language processing, as reflected in verbal IQ, may be related to motion processing. Temporal attentional processing, as reflected in reading speed, may also contribute. These findings were presented at the Annual Meeting of the Vision Society of Japan (Nakayama et al., 2024) and subsequently published in an international academic journal (Nakayama et al., 2024).

Nakayama R et al. (2024). Evaluating correlations between reading ability and psychophysical measurements of dynamic visual information processing in Japanese adults. Scientific Reports, 14, 29546. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-024-80172-0

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Utsunomiya University