More Like this

1. Low Spatial Proximity Between Text and Illustrations Improves Children’s Comprehension and Attention: An Eye Tracking Study.

   Boyd, M ; Godwin, K.E. ; Gurchiek, E. ; Fisher, A.V. ; Eng, C.M. ( July 2022 , Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society)

   Culbertson, J. ; Perfors, A ; Rabagliati, H. ; Ramenzoni, V. (Ed.)

   Learning to read is a critical skill; yet only a small portion of children in the United States are reading at or above grade level. Attention is one crucial process that affects the acquisition of reading skills. The process involves selectively choosing task relevant information and requires monitoring competing demands. Many books for beginning readers include illustrations, but this design choice may require learners to split their attention between multiple sources of information. This study employed eye tracking to examine whether embedding text within illustrations in children’s e-books inadvertently induces attentional competition. The results showed that spatially separating illustrations from the text in beginning reader books reduces attentional competition and improves children’s reading comprehension. This study shows that changes to the design of books for beginning readers can help promote literacy development in children. 

   more » « less
2. Book Design, Attention, and Reading Performance: Current Practices and Opportunities for Optimization

   Godwin, K. ; Eng, C. ; Murray, G. ; Fisher, A.V. ( July 2019 , Proceedings of the 41st Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society)

   Becoming a proficient reader is a critical skill that supports future learning. Toward the end of the primary grades, reading becomes increasingly automatized, and children begin to transition from learning-to-read to reading-to-learn. Yet, the design of beginning reader books may be suboptimal for novice readers. Colorful illustrations that contain irrelevant information (i.e., seductive details) presented in close proximity to the text may increase attentional competition between these sources of information; thus, hampering decoding and reading comprehension. Study 1 examines this hypothesis by experimentally manipulating components of the book design (e.g., presence/absence of seductive details) and investigating its effect on attention and reading performance in first grade students. In Study 2, we conduct an analysis in which we identify common design features in books for beginning readers and examine the prevalence of design features that were fmmd to tax attention in Study 1 and in prior research. Collectively this work identifies an important opportunity in which instructional materials can be optimized to better support children as they learn-to-read. 

   more » « less
3. What Eye Movements Reveal About Later Comprehension of Long Connected Texts

   https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.12905  

   Southwell, Rosy ; Gregg, Julie ; Bixler, Robert ; D'Mello, Sidney K. ( October 2020 , Cognitive Science)

   We know that reading involves coordination between textual characteristics and visual attention, but research linking eye movements during reading and comprehension assessed after reading is surprisingly limited, especially for reading long connected texts. We tested two competing possibilities: (a) the weak association hypothesis: Links between eye movements and comprehension are weak and short‐lived, versus (b) the strong association hypothesis: The two are robustly linked, even after a delay. Using a predictive modeling approach, we trained regression models to predict comprehension scores from global eye movement features, using participant‐level cross‐validation to ensure that the models generalize across participants. We used data from three studies in which readers (Ns = 104, 130, 147) answered multiple‐choice comprehension questions ~30 min after reading a 6,500‐word text, or after reading up to eight 1,000‐word texts. The models generated accurate predictions of participants' text comprehension scores (correlations between observed and predicted comprehension: 0.384, 0.362, 0.372,ps < .001), in line with the strong association hypothesis. We found that making more, but shorter fixations, consistently predicted comprehension across all studies. Furthermore, models trained on one study's data could successfully predict comprehension on the others, suggesting generalizability across studies. Collectively, these findings suggest that there is a robust link between eye movements and subsequent comprehension of a long connected text, thereby connecting theories of low‐level eye movements with those of higher order text processing during reading.

    

   more » « less
4. Going Deep and Far: Gaze-based Models Predict Multiple Depths of Comprehension During and One Week Following Reading

   https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6852998  

   Caruso, Megan ; Peacock, Candace ; Southwell, Rosy ; Zhou, Guojing ; D'Mello, Sidney ( July 2022 , Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Educational Data Mining, International Educational Data Mining Societ)

   What can eye movements reveal about reading, a complex skill ubiquitous in everyday life? Research suggests that gaze can measure short-term comprehension for facts, but it is unknown whether it can measure long-term, deep comprehension. We tracked gaze while 147 participants read long, connected, in-formative texts and completed assessments of rote (factual) and inference (connecting ideas) comprehension while reading a text, after reading a text, after reading five texts, and after a seven-day delay. Gaze-based student-independent computa-tional models predicted both immediate and long-term rote and inference comprehension with moderate accuracies. Surprising-ly, the models were most accurate for comprehension assessed after reading all texts and predicted comprehension even after a week-long delay. This shows that eye movements can provide a lens into the cognitive processes underlying reading compre-hension, including inference formation, and the consolidation of information into long-term memory, which has implications for intelligent student interfaces that can automatically detect and repair comprehension in real-time. 

   more » « less
5. Eye-tracking as a proxy for coherence and complexity of texts

   https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0260236  

   Torres, Débora ; Sena, Wagner R. ; Carmona, Humberto A. ; Moreira, André A. ; Makse, Hernán A. ; Andrade, José S. ( December 2021 , PLOS ONE)

   Ribeiro, Haroldo V. (Ed.)

   Reading is a complex cognitive process that involves primary oculomotor function and high-level activities like attention focus and language processing. When we read, our eyes move by primary physiological functions while responding to language-processing demands. In fact, the eyes perform discontinuous twofold movements, namely, successive long jumps (saccades) interposed by small steps (fixations) in which the gaze “scans” confined locations. It is only through the fixations that information is effectively captured for brain processing. Since individuals can express similar as well as entirely different opinions about a given text, it is therefore expected that the form, content and style of a text could induce different eye-movement patterns among people. A question that naturally arises is whether these individuals’ behaviours are correlated, so that eye-tracking while reading can be used as a proxy for text subjective properties. Here we perform a set of eye-tracking experiments with a group of individuals reading different types of texts, including children stories, random word generated texts and excerpts from literature work. In parallel, an extensive Internet survey was conducted for categorizing these texts in terms of their complexity and coherence, considering a large number of individuals selected according to different ages, gender and levels of education. The computational analysis of the fixation maps obtained from the gaze trajectories of the subjects for a given text reveals that the average “magnetization” of the fixation configurations correlates strongly with their complexity observed in the survey. Moreover, we perform a thermodynamic analysis using the Maximum-Entropy Model and find that coherent texts were closer to their corresponding “critical points” than non-coherent ones, as computed from the Pairwise Maximum-Entropy method, suggesting that different texts may induce distinct cohesive reading activities. 

   more » « less