Paulo Ventura

Paulo Ventura is assistant professor with aggregation at the Faculty of Psychology – University of Lisbon.

In my Master thesis I explored the role of orthography on spoken word recognition using metaphonological tasks. This line of research continued with on-line tasks, such as lexical decision and shadowing in both adults and children. We showed that this influence occurs in adult readers only for late, lexical, levels of processing but not for early, sublexical, levels of processing. As for beginning readers, the influence of orthography, via sublexical orthographic-phonological connections, occurs for all levels of processing and gradually is restricted to late levels. In my Phd thesis I explored category-specific impairments after herpes simplex encephalitis to help understand the nature and organization of semantic memory in normal people. After several empirical work, I proposed a differential weighting and interactivity of sensorial and non-sensorial features in the mental representation of living and nonliving things. After this set of works, I explored the consequences of learning to read and schooling on several visual and attentional processes, from contour integration in V1 to face cognition, but including other processes like mirror image processing, etc. Within this field of work, I had the opportunity to work with two top neuroscientists, Stanislas Dehaene and Laurent Cohen, a collaboration which resulted, among others, in a Science Journal paper (first author and leading researcher, stanislas dehaene). In the last few years, I became more interested in face and visual word holistic processes. Faces are objects of visual expertise and we usually resort to holistic processing (joint consideration of all features together) to distinguish different faces that are made up of the same features in the same configuration. Using tasks from face processing, we contributed to show that words are also processed holistically. Indeed words also impose difficult discriminations because they are all made up of the same limited set of letters.We also showed that the degree of word holistic processing correlates with the efficiency of access to the lexicon. These lines of research led to approximately 50 papers in english-language journals.

I received two best international-journal paper awards.

One, in 2004, was awarded by ISPA – Instituto Universitário; paper: Ventura, P., Morais, J., Pattamadilok, C., & Kolinsky, R. (2004). The locus of the orthographic consistency effect in auditory word recognition. Language and Cognitive Processes, 19, 57-95.

The other, in 2005, was awarded by FCT (best paper by a young researcher in psychology); paper: Ventura, P., Morais, J., Brito-Mendes, C., & Kolinsky, R. (2005). The mental representation of living and nonliving things: Differential weighting and interactivity of sensorial and non-sensorial features. Memory, 13, 124-147.

In April 2020 one of my papers was a research spotlight of the Psychonomic Society Newsletter. More specifically:
Ventura, P., Fernandes, T., Pereira, A., Guerreiro, J. G., Farinha-Fernandes, A., Delgado, J., Ferreira, M. F., Faustino, B., Raposos, I, Wong, C.N., A. (2020). Holistic word processing is correlated with efficiency in visual word recognition. Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 82, 2739–2750. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13414-020-01988-2.

Throughout my career I received several FCT research grants, both as principal investigator and associated investigator. I also received a special FCT grant to build the voice recording studio at Faculty of Psychology, Universidade de Lisboa.