Undergraduate students Hadleigh Smith and Julia Rich present at the 2012 New England Psychological Association Conference
Together with the faculty mentor, Jennifer Stiegler-Balfour, Ph.D, assistant professor of psychology, Hadleigh Smith (Education/ Psychology 鈥13) and Julia Rich (Psychology/English 鈥13) presented a poster titled 鈥淭he effects of text distracters on comprehension in skilled and less-skilled readers鈥 at the 2012 New England Psychological Association conference in Worcester, Massachusetts.
In their presentation, Smith and Rich outlined which types of text distracters (e.g., semantically related, - unrelated, or visually distracting information) are most disruptive to the reading process of skilled and less-skilled readers.
The results revealed that less-skilled readers were distracted by all distracter information, whereas skilled readers only experienced difficulty suppressing the irrelevant stimuli only when it was semantically related but not when it was only visually or semantically unrelated to the text. The findings were discussed within the context of basic cognitive processes that underlie successful reading comprehension.