Evidence map›Paper›PMID 29733752›Full record

ArticlePsychological science2018

Evidence of Serial Processing in Visual Word Recognition.

Alex L White, John Palmer, Geoffrey M Boynton

Abstract read
In one paragraph

Article in Psychological science, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 22 papers.

0numbers the graph read from it
0cells of the map it votes in
22citing papers in PubMed
–field-weighted citation impact
1 · What the graph read from it

What it found

Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.

The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.

2 · The registry

The trial behind it

Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.

Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.

3 · Its place in the literature

Who cites it

22 citing papers in PubMed.

  1. Simultaneous Cortical Responses to Multiple Written Words.Journal of cognitive neuroscience · 2026
    Article
  2. Simultaneous cortical responses to multiple written words.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026
    Article
  3. Negative effects of redundant targets.Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance · 2026
    Article
  4. Article
  5. Lateralized costs of divided attention to faces.Attention, perception & psychophysics · 2025
    Article
  6. Article
  7. The Spatiotemporal Dynamics of Bottom-Up and Top-Down Processing during At-a-Glance Reading.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2024
    Article
  8. Article
  9. Article
  10. Article
  11. Article
  12. Article
  13. Article
  14. Article
  15. Article
  16. Article
  17. Article
  18. The link between reading ability and visual spatial attention across development.Cortex; a journal devoted to the study of the nervous system and behavior · 2019
    Article
  19. You Can't Recognize Two Words Simultaneously.Trends in cognitive sciences · 2019
    Article
  20. A neural basis of the serial bottleneck in visual word recognition.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2019
    Article
4 · The record

Corrections and comments

PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.

5 · Who and what money

Authors and funding

3 authors.

Alex L WhiteDepartment of Psychology, University of Washington.ORCID 0000-0001-5530-742X
John PalmerDepartment of Psychology, University of Washington.
Geoffrey M BoyntonDepartment of Psychology, University of Washington.

Funding

VISUAL SCIENCES TRAINING PROGRAMT32EY007031 · NEI · UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON · PI Wyeth Daniel Bair, Anitha Pasupathy · 1985 to 2026
$6.1M
The Effects of Attention in Human Visual CortexR01EY012925 · NEI · UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON · PI BOYNTON, GEOFFREY M · 1999 to 2018
$5.6M
The cortical mechanisms of divided attention in word recognitionF32EY026785 · NEI · UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON · PI WHITE, ALEXANDER LINDLEY · 2016 to 2017
$116k
NEI NIH HHS F32 EY026785NEI NIH HHS R01 EY012925NEI NIH HHS T32 EY007031
6 · The paper itself

Abstract

To test the limits of parallel processing in vision, we investigated whether people can recognize two words at once. Participants viewed brief, masked pairs of words and were instructed in advance to judge both of the words (dual-task condition) or just one of the words (single-task condition). For judgments of semantic category, the dual-task deficit was so large that it supported all-or-none serial processing: Participants could recognize only one word and had to guess about the other. Moreover, participants were more likely to be correct about one word if they were incorrect about the other, which also supports a serial-processing model. In contrast, judgments of text color with identical stimuli were consistent with unlimited-capacity parallel processing. Thus, under these conditions, serial processing is necessary to judge the meaning of words but not their physical features. Understanding the implications of this result for natural reading will require further investigation.

Indexed as

PsycholinguisticsReadingAdultAttentionFemaleHumansMalePattern Recognition, VisualRecognition, PsychologyYoung Adultdivided attentionlanguageopen datavisual attentionvisual perceptionword recognition

Identifiers

PMID29733752
PMCPMC6050133

What OpenQuestion holds

Textmetadata
LicenceTDM
Read underepoch 390

Registered trials

None linked

Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.