Visual Orthography

Description

As part of the CRAB (Computerized Reading-related Assessment Battery), the Visual Orthographic task assesses children's ability to discriminate between strings of five characters in two blocked conditions: orthographic (consonant letters) and non-orthographic (matched symbols). Children judge whether two simultaneously presented strings are identical or differ by a substitution or transposition of characters, with discriminability (d′) computed separately for each block. This computerized task targets visual orthographic discrimination, for which associations with reading acquisition and decoding efficiency have been reported in the developmental literature.

Contact & Lab

Contributors

Citation

1. Mirault, J., Massol, S., & Grainger, J. (2022). Effects of non-adjacent letter repetition in the same-different matching task. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 37(10), 1292–1302. https://doi.org/10.1080/23273798.2022.2061022
2. Vildavski, V. Y., Lo Verde, L., Blumberg, G., Parsey, J., & Norcia, A. M. (2022). PseudoSloan: A perimetric-complexity and area-controlled font for vision and reading research. Journal of Vision, 22(10), 7. https://doi.org/10.1167/jov.22.10.7
3. Ziegler, J. C., Pech-Georgel, C., Dufau, S., & Grainger, J. (2010). Rapid processing of letters, digits and symbols: what purely visual-attentional deficit in developmental dyslexia? Developmental Science, 13(4), F8–F14. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-7687.2010.00983.x

Credits

Developed at the Brain and Learning Lab (University of Geneva) under Angela Pasqualotto (task conception) and Zeno Menestrina (software developer) as part of the CRAB (Computerized Reading-related Assessment Battery) project. Software updated by Hugo Farajallah and Zeno Menestrina (2025). Adapted from Unity to HTML/JS by Hugo Farajallah in 2026.

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Other tasks in this suite

CRAB