The ability to read is undoubtedly one of the most important cognitive skills in modern society. However, because reading relies on many cognitive functions (e.g. vision, attention, memory, linguistic processing, eye movement control), several aspects of the reading process are still poorly understood. The goal of this project was to advance our understanding of the role of attention in reading. We also questioned whether abnormalities in the allocation of attention may be a root cause of problems in reading, such as dyslexia. Anticipating this possibility, we developed a reading interface intended to improve reading in dyslexia.
In total, the project comprised five objectives:
- To reveal word-to-word influences during reading, such as influences of the syntactic categories of words on the ease of recognizing adjacent words.
- To determine the distribution of attention during reading (our findings suggest that multiple words are processed in parallel, at relatively 'deep' levels (i.e. not just letter information, but also information about grammar).
- To determine how the brain computes word order (e.g. in the phrase "Do love you me?" many readers do not notice the incorrect word order. Our research suggests that this is due to grammatical constraints that are in play while readers process multiple words simultaneously).
- To find out whether dyslexia may be caused by attentional problems.
- To summarize current knowledge about the reading process in a computational model - that is, a computer implementation of our current theoretical framework, called OB1-reader.
