University of North Carolina Wilmington
Project Title: Assessing and Guiding Visual Attending by Early Learners During Picture Book Reading
Taylor Lewis is a PhD student at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, studying under the supervision of Dr. Tom Cariveau. She earned her BAEd from UNC Chapel Hill and her MS in psychology from UNCW. Her research focuses on leveraging stimulus control technologies to refine instructional methods and better support children experiencing learning difficulties. The Sidney W. and Janet R. Bijou Grant will support her dissertation, which examines visual attending and sources of stimulus control during picture-book reading with early learners.
Pictures are commonly presented alongside text in children’s early reading materials, which may support errorless learning, reading comprehension, and motivation to read. However, research suggests that pictures may hinder development of other outcomes, including responding controlled by textual stimuli (see review by Kennedy & Cariveau, 2023). Typical picture-text arrangements may result in limited attending to text, as children may respond correctly by tacting the pictures rather than reading the text. This effect has been termed the picture-text problem. Taylor’s master’s thesis (Lewis & Cariveau, 2025) showed that remediation of the picture-text problem can be achieved by arranging compound stimulus arrays that require differential responding to the text. Although promising, there remain several other potential sources of stimulus control in early reading contexts that can impact reading development. For example, the presence of multiple stimulus elements in picture-text arrangements could produce responding under multiple control. Michael et al. (2011) argued that multiple control is the “rule rather than the exception” (p. 3) and Skinner (1957) noted that “…the strength of a single response may be, and usually is, a function of more than one variable” (p. 277). The current study will leverage eye-tracking technologies and stimulus control analyses to study multiple control in picture-book reading by young children. Using this approach, the project will seek to address questions about multiple sources of control in early reading, developmental changes in visual attending and stimulus control, and methods to promote textual responding during early reading experiences.
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