The theoretical motivation comes from the magnocellular-dorsal hypothesis of reading. This framework proposes that a neural pathway specialized for rapid temporal processing and spatial attention, the occipito-parietal “where” pathway, plays a crucial role in distributing attentional resources across text. Spatial attention supported by this system is thought to be fundamental for processing letters at different positions, converting orthographic codes into phonological ones, and accessing meaning quickly from visual input. Previous work has linked difficulties in visuo-spatial attention to reading difficulties, and studies of dyslexia have reported less stable binocular fixation and weaker control over eye muscles during reading. The magnocellular theory has faced criticism, and many researchers argue that dyslexia cannot be reduced to a single cause, but substantial evidence supports a genuine involvement of perceptual and visuo-spatial skills in reading.

The Padova team reasoned that if reading depends partly on these visual capacities, then visual perceptual learning, the well-documented phenomenon in which repeated practice on a perceptual task produces long-lasting improvement, might transfer to reading. Visual perceptual learning is a manifestation of cortical plasticity and has already yielded positive outcomes in clinical populations including hemianopia, amblyopia, and macular degeneration, as well as in dyslexic readers. Earlier training studies have exercised the magnocellular stream through coherent motion detection, direction discrimination with sine-wave gratings, and combined oculomotor and search batteries. One particularly relevant study reported that a single ten-minute session combining eye-movement exercises with visual search was followed by faster reading in French children with dyslexia, but that design could not isolate the contribution of the search component. The new study set out to do exactly that, using a single task family with no oculomotor exercises at all.

Eighty-five adult native Italian speakers took part, all classified as typical readers on the basis of self-reported history, with normal or corrected vision. Forty-two were randomly assigned to one of three training versions, fourteen per group, while forty-three served as a no-training control group who completed only the pretest and posttest. The larger control group was a deliberate methodological choice: it sharpened the estimate of the no-training trajectory, including practice effects and measurement noise, and increased statistical power for the central comparisons between each training group and the controls. Reading was assessed with a word-reading test and a nonword-reading test from the DDE-2 battery, plus a lexical decision test requiring participants to silently scan lists of sixty words and sixty nonwords and mark the nonwords. Speed and accuracy were recorded as separate dependent variables, with no error penalty applied to time scores.

The training itself revolved around Gabor patches, stimuli produced by combining a sine-wave luminance grating with a circular Gaussian envelope, presented at roughly five cycles per degree and 95 percent contrast. For nine consecutive days, participants completed seven daily blocks of 144 search displays, each containing more than a hundred Gabor stimuli and remaining on screen until a response was given or ten seconds elapsed. The three versions differed in how the target was defined. In the orientation version, the target was a single Gabor tilted orthogonally to all distractors, an easy target that pops out of the display. In the phase version, the target matched the distractors in orientation but had an inverted phase, a reversal of its black and white luminance pattern, making it highly camouflaged and forcing detailed scrutiny of individual stimuli. In the configuration version, the target was not a single patch but a circular arrangement of multiple Gabors, requiring contour integration and perceptual grouping, a choice inspired by earlier findings that reading acquisition itself enhances early contour integration and that illiterate adults struggle to group circularly arranged patches into a single percept.

The training data confirmed that the three tasks sat at genuinely different difficulty levels. Sensitivity, indexed by the signal-detection measure d-prime, improved significantly across the nine days, and response times fell, classic signatures of perceptual learning. The orientation task produced the highest d-prime values and the fastest responses, the phase task the lowest sensitivity, the slowest responses, and the most timeouts, with the configuration task falling in between. All pairwise group differences were significant after correction, and the phase group showed the steepest improvement slope in response times. Because the task included both target-present and target-absent trials, the researchers also tracked response criterion to distinguish genuine gains in discriminability from simple shifts in the willingness to report a target. Together, these measures established that any downstream differences between groups could be interpreted against a clearly characterized gradient of perceptual demand.

The critical test compared posttest reading performance across groups while statistically controlling for each participant’s pretest baseline. The results were strikingly outcome-specific. The phase group, which had endured the most perceptually demanding task, showed significantly lower adjusted posttest reading times than the no-training group on the word-reading test, corresponding to roughly four seconds faster, and on the lexical decision test, roughly nine seconds faster. The configuration group showed significantly lower adjusted posttest times on the nonword-reading test, about three and a half seconds faster, a task that relies heavily on grapheme-to-phoneme conversion. The easy orientation task produced no reliable advantage on any timed measure. Notably, no consistent training-related benefit emerged for accuracy on any test, a pattern the authors interpret cautiously given that the accuracy component of the DDE-2 has weaker test-retest reliability and that skilled adult readers commit so few errors that variability is severely restricted.

An exploratory correlation analysis added an intriguing wrinkle. If transfer to reading were driven simply by how much an individual improved at visual search, then gains in d-prime from day one to day nine should predict gains in reading speed. They did not. Correlations between individual search improvement and reading-speed change were near zero for word reading, nonword reading, and lexical decision alike. This does not undermine the group-level effects, but it signals that the mechanism of transfer is not a straightforward linear relationship between perceptual sensitivity and reading speed. The authors suggest that other factors, such as search strategy, response criterion, general visual-attentional engagement, or sheer time on task, may have contributed, and that the present design cannot adjudicate among them.

Indeed, the authors are careful to frame the study as exploratory and to enumerate its limits. The three search tasks differed not only in difficulty but also in target definition and the search strategy they likely encouraged. Under a contemporary framework distinguishing priority guidance, in which a salient target is selected from a priority map, from clump scanning, in which observers systematically inspect contiguous groups of items, the orientation task probably rewarded simple priority guidance while the phase task demanded systematic scrutiny and the configuration task engaged grouping processes. Without manipulating set size, estimating search slopes, or recording eye movements, the observed reading effects cannot be uniquely attributed to difficulty, search mode, or any specific mechanism. Training dose also varied, since the phase condition consumed roughly ninety minutes daily against thirty for orientation, a consequence of slower responses and more timeouts rather than extra trials. A sensitivity analysis based on ten thousand simulations showed the study was powered only to detect relatively large effects, and for two error measures no plausible effect could achieve adequate power at all.

Even so, the study delivers a genuinely provocative preliminary result: a training program containing no letters, no sounds, and no reading whatsoever was associated with faster performance on some timed reading-related outcomes in adults who already read normally, with the most demanding visual tasks producing the clearest transfer. The effects are modest in absolute terms and their clinical or educational significance remains unproven, particularly because the sample consisted of typical adult readers reading in Italian, a language with highly transparent orthography whose findings may not generalize to deeper orthographies. The authors argue that establishing baseline effects in the neurotypical brain is a necessary foundation before testing dyslexic populations, whose brain structures and connectivity may differ and require protocol adaptations. The next steps they propose are clear: larger samples, preregistered analyses, designs that manipulate difficulty within a single search paradigm while controlling training dose, and extension to children and readers with dyslexia. If those replications hold, the humble Gabor patch could become an unexpected tool in the science of reading enhancement.

Subject of Research: Visual search training and its effects on reading speed in adult typical readers

Article Title: Probing the use of visual search as a tool to enhance reading speed

Article References: Carabba, F., Borsati, C., Fontana, G., Altieri, E., Vicovaro, M., & Battaglini, L. (2026). Probing the use of visual search as a tool to enhance reading speed. Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 88(7), Article 190. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13414-026-03336-2

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3758/s13414-026-03336-2

Keywords: visual search, reading speed, perceptual learning, magnocellular-dorsal system, Gabor patches, dyslexia, visual attention, contour integration, psychophysics, oculomotor control, lexical decision, cortical plasticity

The English Pseudoword Lexicon Project, or EPLeP, was created by Fabio Marson, Rolando Bonandrini, Iva Šaban, Simona Amenta, Marco Marelli, and colleagues at the University of Milano-Bicocca as a registered report. The team collected lexical decision data for nearly 13,500 non-lexical stimuli and roughly 4,400 real words from 1,416 native English speakers recruited through the Prolific platform, all based in the United States. Across four online experiments, participants judged whether letter strings were words, generating more than 1.4 million individual trials. The sheer scale of the effort places EPLeP alongside the great megastudies of visual word recognition, but with a crucial difference: here, the non-lexical stimuli are the main event rather than an afterthought.

The design of the stimulus sets reflects a sophisticated taxonomy of non-words. The researchers distinguished three categories. Morphologically simple pseudowords are unattested letter strings that obey the graphotactic rules of English but cannot be decomposed into a stem plus an affix, items such as plief or dokstine. Morphologically complex pseudowords are built by combining real stems with real suffixes, yielding items such as plungable or snottant, and respecting the orthographic adjustments that English affixation typically requires. Finally, nonwords are letter strings that violate English graphotactics altogether, such as iprwvca or pghtmyg, making them conspicuously unlike anything in the language. Words in the database were likewise split into morphologically simple and morphologically complex sets, drawn from the MorphoLex database and filtered through frequency corpora including SUBTLEX-UK and SUBTLEX-US.

This careful construction matters because previous megastudies, however large, shared systematic limitations when it came to non-lexical material. None included graphotactically illegal nonwords, morphological complexity of pseudowords was never systematically controlled, and the lack of stimulus control opened the door to list effects, in which an item appears easier or harder to process simply because of what else appears alongside it. EPLeP addresses all three problems by running separate experiments for each pseudoword type, plus a fourth experiment in which all three types were intermixed with an equal number of items, allowing the researchers to compare between-experiment and within-experiment processing of the same stimuli.

The headline finding is that not all non-words are processed alike, and the differences are striking. Morphologically complex pseudowords triggered the deepest level of processing, taking the longest to reject, while graphotactically illegal nonwords were rejected fastest and with the shallowest engagement of lexical machinery. Simple pseudowords fell in between. This graded pattern suggests that the visual word recognition system responds to the degree of linguistic structure in a letter string: the more an item resembles a well-formed English word, complete with a plausible stem and suffix, the more it activates lexical and morphological processes, and the harder it becomes to dismiss as a non-word. The result replicates a long line of evidence showing that even nonexistent strings undergo morphological decomposition, much as real words like goodness are parsed into good and ness.

Perhaps the most consequential discovery concerns how the type of pseudoword in an experiment reshapes the processing of real words. When words appeared in lists containing morphologically complex pseudowords, the classic effects of orthographic neighborhood, length, and frequency on word recognition were amplified. The researchers interpret this as evidence of heightened lexical competition: because complex pseudowords are decomposed into stems and suffixes and can even evoke plausible meanings, they flood the system with lexical and semantic activation, forcing participants to scrutinize words more deeply. Conversely, when words were paired with graphotactically illegal nonwords, these psycholinguistic effects shrank, and in an ancillary analysis the usual advantage for morphologically simple words over complex ones was even reversed. In other words, everything the field knows about word recognition from lexical decision studies is partly a function of the pseudowords used in each study, a conclusion the authors describe as a call for a contextual reframing of the literature.

The dataset also delivered some surprises that complicate standard assumptions. Contrary to expectations, the researchers observed a reversed lexicality effect on response times, with non-lexical items answered faster than words, likely driven by the ceiling-level performance on highly implausible nonwords and by flexible response strategies participants adopt depending on list composition. Reliability analyses showed that response times and accuracy for simple and complex pseudowords reached levels comparable to those reported for words in landmark megastudies such as the French Lexicon Project, but reliability for nonwords was substantially low, apparently because near-perfect performance leaves almost no systematic variance to measure. External validation was successful: response times for the 300 simple pseudowords shared with the British Lexicon Project correlated significantly with the earlier data, confirming that the new measurements are trustworthy.

Methodologically, the project also offers a cautionary tale about measurement. The orthographic Levenshtein distance metric known as OLD20, which quantifies how similar a string is to its twenty closest real-word neighbors, behaved in this dataset much like a proxy for stimulus length, with the two variables highly correlated. The authors advise future users of the resource to interpret OLD20 effects cautiously and to rely on length when analyzing the data. Such transparency about the limits of standard psycholinguistic measures is itself a contribution, and it illustrates the value of megastudy datasets for stress-testing the tools the field takes for granted.

The applications of EPLeP extend well beyond theoretical psycholinguistics. Researchers building computational models of visual word recognition can now evaluate their simulations against a rich behavioral benchmark that systematically varies orthographic legality and morphological structure. Experimentalists can use the database to select stimuli with known performance profiles for priming studies or new lexical decision experiments, and clinicians can draw on it to construct diagnostic tests of pseudoword processing for populations with reading disorders such as pure alexia or dyslexia. The data, along with stimulus generation code and analysis scripts, are freely available on the Open Science Framework, and the registered report format ensured that the analyses were preregistered before data collection began.

The broader message of the project is that pseudowords deserve a central place in the science of reading. Recent work has shown that even strings never encountered before can carry semantic weight, activating meaning-related patterns and producing frequency-like effects, and EPLeP now provides the large-scale evidence base to pursue those questions systematically. Although the findings come from English, a language whose orthographic quirks make it an outlier among the world’s writing systems, the authors argue that the underlying architecture of lexical-semantic processing is likely language-independent, and they call for replications in more transparent orthographies, agglutinative languages, and writing systems such as Mandarin where word boundaries are less clearly defined. For now, the English Pseudoword Lexicon Project stands as a reminder that some of the most informative things a mind ever reads are the words that were never there at all.

Subject of Research: A large-scale lexical decision database for investigating how English pseudowords and nonwords are processed during visual word recognition.

Article Title: The English Pseudoword Lexicon Project (EPLeP): A resource for investigating pseudoword processing

Article References: Marson, F., Bonandrini, R., Šaban, I., Amenta, S., & Marelli, M. (2026). The English Pseudoword Lexicon Project (EPLeP): A resource for investigating pseudoword processing. Behavior Research Methods, 58(11), Article 297. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-026-03151-5

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3758/s13428-026-03151-5

Keywords: pseudowords, lexical decision, psycholinguistics, visual word recognition, megastudy, morphology, nonwords, mental lexicon, orthographic neighborhood, Behavior Research Methods, open science, word recognition