Project description:This article includes the description of data information from an idea generation task (alternate uses task, (Guilford, 1967) [1]) and a letter-by-letter reading task under two background brightness conditions with healthy adults as well as a baseline measurement and questionnaire data (SIPI (Huba et al., 1981) [2]; DDFS (Singer and Antrobus, 1972) [3], 1963; RIBS (Runco et al., 2001) [4]). Data are hosted at the Open Science Framework (OSF): https://osf.io/fh66g/ (Walcher et al., 2017) [5]. There you will find eye tracking data, task performance data, questionnaires data, analyses scripts (in R, R Core Team, 2017 [6]), eye tracking paradigms (in the Experiment Builder (SR Research Ltd., [7]) and graphs on pupil and angle of eye vergence dynamics. Data are interpreted and discussed in the article 'Looking for ideas: Eye behavior during goal-directed internally focused cognition' (Walcher et al., 2017) [8].
Project description:The scientific study of reading has long been animated by questions of parallel vs. serial processing. Do readers recognize words serially, adding each one sequentially to a representation of the sentence structure? One fascinating phenomenon to emerge from this research is the transposed word effect: when asked to judge whether sentences are grammatical, readers often fail to notice grammatical errors caused by transposing two words. This effect could be evidence that readers recognize multiple words in parallel. Here we provide converging evidence that the transposed word effect is also consistent with serial processing because it occurs robustly when the words in each sentence are presented serially. We further investigated how the effect relates to individual differences in reading speed, to gaze fixation patterns, and to differences in difficulty across sentences. In a pretest, we first measured the natural English reading rate of 37 participants, which varied widely. In a subsequent grammatical decision task, we presented grammatical and ungrammatical sentences in two modes: one with all words presented simultaneously, and the other with single words presented sequentially at each participant's natural rate. Unlike prior studies that used a fixed sequential presentation rate, we found that the magnitude of the transposed word effect was at least as strong in the sequential presentation mode as in the simultaneous mode, for both error rates and response times. Moreover, faster readers were more likely to miss transpositions of words presented sequentially. We argue that these data favor a "noisy channel" model of comprehension in which skilled readers rely on prior knowledge to rapidly infer the meaning of sentences, allowing for apparent errors in spatial or temporal order, even when the individual words are recognized one at a time.
Project description:This study is a large-scale exploration of the influence that individual reading skills exert on eye-movement behavior in sentence reading. Seventy one non-college-bound 16-24 year-old speakers of English completed a battery of 18 verbal and cognitive skill assessments, and read a series of sentences as their eye movements were monitored. Statistical analyses were performed to establish what tests of reading abilities were predictive of eye-movement patterns across this population and how strong the effects were. We found that individual scores in rapid automatized naming and word identification tests (i) were the only participant variables with reliable predictivity throughout the time-course of reading; (ii) elicited effects that superceded in magnitude the effects of established predictors like word length or frequency; and (iii) strongly modulated the influence of word length and frequency on fixation times. We discuss implications of our findings for testing reading ability, as well as for research of eye-movements in reading.
Project description:Reading acquisition in alphabetic languages starts with learning the associations between speech sounds and letters. This learning process is related to crucial developmental changes of brain regions that serve visual, auditory, multisensory integration, and higher cognitive processes. Here, we studied the development of audiovisual processing and integration of letter-speech sound pairs with an audiovisual target detection functional MRI paradigm. Using a longitudinal approach, we tested children with varying reading outcomes before the start of reading acquisition (T1, 6.5 yo), in first grade (T2, 7.5 yo), and in second grade (T3, 8.5 yo). Early audiovisual integration effects were characterized by higher activation for incongruent than congruent letter-speech sound pairs in the inferior frontal gyrus and ventral occipitotemporal cortex. Audiovisual processing in the left superior temporal gyrus significantly increased from the prereading (T1) to early reading stages (T2, T3). Region of interest analyses revealed that activation in left superior temporal gyrus (STG), inferior frontal gyrus and ventral occipitotemporal cortex increased in children with typical reading fluency skills, while poor readers did not show the same development in these regions. The incongruency effect bilaterally in parts of the STG and insular cortex at T1 was significantly associated with reading fluency skills at T3. These findings provide new insights into the development of the brain circuitry involved in audiovisual processing of letters, the building blocks of words, and reveal early markers of audiovisual integration that may be predictive of reading outcomes.
Project description:In the present study, we investigated whether inter-individual differences in vagally-mediated cardiac activity (high frequency heart rate variability, HF-HRV) would be associated with inter-individual differences in mind-reading, a specific aspect of social cognition. To this end, we recorded resting state HF-HRV in 49 individuals before they completed the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test, a test that required the identification of mental states on basis of subtle facial cues. As expected, inter-individual differences in HF-HRV were associated with inter-individual differences in mental state identification: Individuals with high HF-HRV were more accurate in the identification of positive but not negative states than individuals with low HF-HRV. Individuals with high HF-HRV may, thus, be more sensitive to positive states of others, which may increase the likelihood to detect cues that encourage approach and affiliative behavior in social contexts. Inter-individual differences in mental state identification may, thus, explain why individuals with high HF-HRV have been shown to be more successful in initiating and maintaining social relationships than individuals with low HF-HRV.
Project description:Although the causes of dyslexia are still debated, all researchers agree that the main challenge is to find ways that allow a child with dyslexia to read more words in less time, because reading more is undisputedly the most efficient intervention for dyslexia. Sophisticated training programs exist, but they typically target the component skills of reading, such as phonological awareness. After the component skills have improved, the main challenge remains (that is, reading deficits must be treated by reading more--a vicious circle for a dyslexic child). Here, we show that a simple manipulation of letter spacing substantially improved text reading performance on the fly (without any training) in a large, unselected sample of Italian and French dyslexic children. Extra-large letter spacing helps reading, because dyslexics are abnormally affected by crowding, a perceptual phenomenon with detrimental effects on letter recognition that is modulated by the spacing between letters. Extra-large letter spacing may help to break the vicious circle by rendering the reading material more easily accessible.
Project description:Previous research has generally focused on understanding individual variation in either on-line processing or off-line comprehension even though some theories explicitly link difficulty in processing to comprehension problems. The goal of the current study was to examine individual variation in performance both during on-line and off-line reading measures. A battery of psycholinguistic and cognitive tests was administered to community college and university students. In addition, participants read texts in an eye-tracker and answered comprehension questions about them. Multi-level modeling was used to determine the individual-difference factors that modulated the relation between word-level characteristics (e.g., length, frequency, surprisal) and fixation durations. The analyses showed that language experience, decoding, and WMC interacted with word characteristics to influence fixation durations, whereas language experience and reasoning predicted comprehension. The results suggest that individual variation in processing does not map directly to variation in comprehension as some theories predict.
Project description:Word identification is undeniably important for skilled reading and ultimately reading comprehension. Interestingly, both lexical and sublexical procedures can support word identification. Recent cross-linguistic comparisons have demonstrated that there are biases in orthographic coding (e.g., holistic vs. analytic) linked with differences in writing systems, such that holistic orthographic coding is correlated with lexical-level reading procedures and vice versa. The current study uses a measure of holistic visual processing used in the face processing literature, orientation sensitivity, to test individual differences in word identification within a native English population. Results revealed that greater orientation sensitivity (i.e., greater holistic processing) was associated with a reading profile that relies less on sublexical phonological measures and more on lexical-level characteristics within the skilled English readers. Parallels to Chinese procedures of reading and a proposed alternative route to skilled reading are discussed.
Project description:Written language is a human invention that our brains did not evolve for. Yet, most research has focused on finding a single theory of reading, identifying the common set of cognitive and neural processes shared across individuals, neglecting individual differences. In contrast, we investigated variation in single word reading. Using a novel statistical method for analyzing heterogeneity in multi-subject task-based functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we clustered readers based on their brain's response to written stimuli. Separate behavioral testing and neuroimaging analysis shows that these clusters differed in the role of the sublexical pathway in processing written language, but not in reading skill. Taken together, these results suggest that individuals vary in the cognitive and neural mechanisms involved in word reading. In general, neurocognitive theories need to account not only for what tends to be true of the population, but also the types of variation that exist, even within a neurotypical population.