Lab Research Topics
Basic Processes of Reading
The major focus of research in the lab is on how we read. Skilled reading involves using both visual and language information to guide eye movements. Our lab focuses primarily on how our eye movements in reading are controlled - how do we decide where to look and for how long during reading - and how reading is similar to and different from other tasks.
Individual Differences in Reading
As part of our focus on reading, we study how people differ in their reading ability. This focus leads us to study many different populations, including:
Second Language Learners
People learning another language experience different challenges from child learners. Eye tracking can be used to explore whether learners process ther new language differently from natives, how prificient they are in the new language, how their reading skill is related to oral proficiency, how effective different instructional techniques are, and a variety of other questions. Much of this research is done in collaboration with colleagues in the BYU College of Humanities.
Children
Becoming a good reader requires more than just learning words. A skilled reader develops the ability to precisely control the eyes in order to efficiently gather information from text. By exploring how children's eye movements change over time and in response to increased skill and knowledge, we can get a better understanding of how language and reading abilities develop, how to foster these abilities, and how to diagnose and treat difficulties early.
Reading Disabilities
Individuals with reading disorders such as dyslexia can teach us a lot about reading. And basic research on reading can help inform clinical practice.
Doing Good Science
Another focus of our lab is doing good science. This means a few things:
Understanding how our tools work and using them properly
The primary tool we use in our lab is eye-tracking (see a quick primer on eye-tracking here or a more academic review paper here https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijpsycho.2020.05.010). We also use EEG and fMRI, often in combination with eye-tracking. Using these tools properly is essential for getting good data. Through our teaching and writing, our lab aims to encourage best practices in data collection.
Properly conducting statistical analysis of data
Once you have data, it is important to use rigorous statistical methods to analyze the data. Our lab has a strong focus on not just using statistical methods properly, but on education and communication to the broader community, especially future scientists. For examples, see this article (https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-016-0809-y) or this page on our website.
Clear and open sharing of results, data, and analysis code
Science must be transparent and reproducible to be useful, meaning that other scientists must be able to understand, critique, check, and redo each others' work. For this to happen, it is not enough to simply write up what was found; the raw data must be freely shared, as well as the computer code that was used to analyze it. We have spend significant time and resources to create and share large data sets openly and freely, most notably the Provo Corpus (https://osf.io/sjefs/), a corpus of eye-tracking data from the reading of texts tagged for word predictability and other lexical measures.
Additional Interests
Like most scientists, we're interested in everything. Some other topics that we have studied include:
Psycholinguistics
Because reading is a language-based tasks, we have a strong interest in how human beings understand language. This includes topics such as visual word recognition, letter position encoding, morphological processing, and syntactic processing.
Visual scenes
Reading is also a visual task, so understanding how we perceive the world more broadly contrubites to our understanding of reading. So we also study visual scene processing - how we make sense of images of places. We conduct studies on visual search, visual object recognition, and scene memory.
Neuroscience of Reading
In order to fully understand how we read, we need to explore the brain. Using a combination of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and eye-tracking, we are exploring how the brain recognizes words and combines them into sentences and paragraphs, as well as how it plans eye movements precisely to allow efficient intake of visual information. This research takes place at the BYU MRI Research Facility.
Clinical Applications of Eye Tracking
Eye movements are a highly sensitive measure of cognitive processes, so tracking the eyes can reveal a great deal about how the mind works and why it sometimes doesn't work the way we expect. These projects use eye-tracking to explore the causes and consequences of disorders and cognitive impairments, and how such impairments might be diagnosed and treated. Neurological disorders explored include autism, ADHD, and traumatic brain injury.