CCN meeting | Joshua Snell (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands), invited by Louisa Bogaerts

Object localization in reading

Arguably, no visual task is so unnatural and complex as the act of reading. This is because reading demands a great deal from various cognitive components, such as vision, attention, memory, linguistic processing and oculomotor control. Nonetheless, here I’ll argue that the essence of reading is summarized with just two words: object localization. I will discuss how readers encode the positions of letters in words, and the positions of words in sentences (e.g., what causes readers to miss the error in ‘do love you me’?); and whether these processes rely on shared underlying mechanisms. I also outline my recent theory of visual word recognition, PONG (which describes the Positional Ordering of N-Grams; Snell, 2025, Psych Rev).