What a Simple Letter Detection Task Can Tell Us About Cognitive Processes in Reading
Understanding reading is a central issue for psychology, with major societal implications. Over the past five decades, a simple letter detection task has been used as a window on the psycholinguistic processes involved in reading. When readers are asked to read a text for comprehension while marking with a pencil all instances of a target letter, they miss some of the letters in a systematic way known as the missing letter effect. In the current article, we review evidence from studies that have emphasized neuroimaging, eye movement, rapid serial visual presentation, and auditory passages. As we review, the missing letter effect captures a wide variety of cognitive processes, including lexical activation, attention, and extraction of phrase structure. To account for the large set of findings generated by studies of the missing letter effect, we advanced an attentional disengagement model that is rooted in how attention is allocated to and disengaged from lexical items during reading, which we have recently shown applies equally to listening.