ROAR · Investigating the Role of Attention in Reading
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2019-10-01 → 2022-09-09
- EU contribution
- €175,572
- Participants
- 1
- Scheme
- MSCA-IF
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Results in brief
Investigating the Role of Attention in Reading
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.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
Reading is undoubtedly one of the most important cognitive skills in modern societies; yet, despite decades of reading research, some critical issues remain poorly understood. Given that the reading process is cognitively multi-faceted (involving linguistic processing, oculo-motor processing, memory and attention), getting to understand the reading process in full is by definition an interdisciplinary endeavour. Therefore, striking an interdisciplinary alliance between the fields of reading and attention, this project's mission is to increase understanding of the role of attention in reading (ROAR). Specifically, this project aims to answer the question of how attention is distributed across the visual field during reading, and how attention is used to organize incoming linguistic information. Moreover, this project offers a novel attention-based perspective on reading problems and dyslexia, along with a practical application to help remedy such problems. In short, getting to grips with how attention operates in reading may be key to solving several long-standing questions. This project comprises state-of-the-art electro-encephalography and eye-tracking techniques that will provide novel means to investigate attention in reading. Moreover, a recently developed reading interface, geared at facilitating word recognition by reducing interference from surrounding words, will be upgraded and tested with dyslexic readers. Thus, this project is perfectly placed in the Goldilocks zone between fundamental research and practical applicability.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- STICHTING VU · AmsterdamCoordinatorNetherlands
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union