| Summary: | Although visual perceptual and perceptual motor tasks emerge from diverse theoretical rationales-and are used in a variety of contexts, systematic comparisons of the significance of task parameters in differentiating between subject groups are lacking. The present study compares the performance by average and below average readers on a group of visual perceptual, perceptual motor and temporal sequence tasks, systematically varied across presentation and response parameters, in order to explore the relative significance of task parameters, and also to examine cognitive processes used by the groups in task performance. Subjects were initially identified as average or below average readers on the basis of reading test scores, and the final sample of 40 average and 40 below average readers was selected by matching for IQ across reading groups. A battery of 10 tasks was administered to all subjects in the final sample. T-tests between groups indicated that some categories of tasks, including visual synthesis and temporal sequence tasks, differentiated between groups more powerfully than others, although no single parameter emerged as uniquely significant. Task inter-correlations and factor analysis results suggested that patterns of cognitive processes differed between groups. Average readers tended to use a single process in performance of several task variations, while the performance of below average readers tended to be dominated by task-specific demands. === Arts, Faculty of === Psychology, Department of === Graduate
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