Ph.D. Columbia University, 1975.
Perception Graduate Program Director
Professor of Psychology
Adjunct Professor in the Parmly Hearing Institute
Phone: 312-508-3045
Fax: 312-508-8713
email: rbowen@luc.edu
Vita (Adobe Acrobat Format)
Richard W. Bowen
Professor of Psychology
Adjunct Professor of the Parmly Hearing Institute
My current research concerns abnormal perceptual processing associative with dyslexia (reading disability). I have an active collaboration with Dr. Beverly Wright (auditory psychophysics) and Dr. Steven Zecker (learning disabilities clinician and statistician).Doctors Wright and Zecrer are in the Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders a Northwestern University.In the past year, we have completed a long-term project measuring deficits in visual and auditory processing associated with adult dyslexia.Some of the results of this project had been reported previously.We are at work on a manuscript for Nature based on presubmission approval from the journal.We will report that adult dyslexics have a perceptual deficit that affects both the auditory and visual systems.Compared to controls, observers with dyslexia show abnormally increased backward masking between two competing stimuli.These stimuli are either simple sounds or simple visual patterns. We have recently analyzed the psychometric variability associated with elevated visual thresholds in dyslexia.We find no correlation between the size of the visual deficit and the slope of the psychometric function from which the measure was obtained.From this we infer that the deficits in visual masking we observe are truly perceptual, and not based on cognitive factors such as the uncertainty in the task or the demands of ordering stimuli in force-choice psychophysics.We see this latter point is an exciting breakthrough since it is generally true that any particulardeficit in perceptual performance associated with dyslexia might be explained with a model emphasizing cognitive processing.
This year my collaborators and I also completed an invited review for current opinion in neurobiology which summarized the recent literature on visual, auditory, and tactile deficits associative with language and reading disorders.
Recent publications resulting from our collaboration:
Bowen, R. W., Wright, B. A., and Zecker, S. G.s#147;Dyslexic observers show a backward
time shift in masking of patterns of low spatial frequency.” in Vision Science and
Its Applications, O.S.A. Technical Digest (Optical
Society of America, Washington, D.C., 1999), pp. 161-164.
Bowen, R. W., Wright, B. A. , Zecker, S. G. and Rudden, D. Temporal pattern masking function in dyslexic and normal observers. Investigative Ophthalmology and Visual Science 40, No. 4, S33, 1999.Abstract of a paper presented at the meeting of the Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology (ARVO), Ft. Lauderdale. Fla., May, 1999.
Wright, B. A., Bowen, R.W. and Zecker, S. G. Nonlinguistic perceptual deficits associated with reading and language disorders.Current Opinion in Neurobiology 10, 482-486, 2000.