Week 3: Link & Reflection

So, seeing as how next Friday is payday for any student employee at the college, I think you should all consider investing in your own tachistoscope, found for the shockingly low price of $4,999.99 here: http://www.kpsurplus.com/products/view/9760

I was really interested to learn more about tachistocopes because a) chronoscopes bored and confused me and b) I can't imagine something with such an absurd name NOT being awesome. So, I did some further research and learned that tachistoscopes have been used to help those with dyslexia improve their reading abilities. As we talked about in class, these instruments were used originally to project images for the purpose of either improving recognition or flashing stimuli too fast to be recognized consciously. Tachistoscopes have come a long way since their invention by German psychologists in the 19th century, and have been implicated in a variety of experimental conditions in the field of cognitive science.

In an article published in Brain and Cognition, twelve dyslexic children underwent a four month treatment with tachistoscopic presentation. A list of words was presented in a standard lateral manner on a pc screen for one group, while the other group received the same stimuli in random lateral position. Though the method of this study is slightly confusing, I was able to gather the conclusion that the tachistoscopic treatment helped reading accuracy of both words and nonwords significantly for both groups. The link to the article is here: http://csaweb113v.csa.com/ids70/view_record.php?id=2&recnum=1&log=from_res&SID=2l26bc5sfs1r77cp1512fmbjh1&mark_id=search%3A2%3A0%2C0%2C2

In another realm, tachistoscopes are apparently popular for subliminal advertising purposes. The idea is that, although those subject to these stimuli will claim to never have read or even seen them, their brief appearance is supposedly enough to register with our subconscious and persuade us to act in accordance to their message. There is an interesting article on how the "t-scope" is used in advertising (and how it can be an arduous process) here: http://www.sykronix.com/researching/tscope.htm