research

the plain english version
for the jargony scientific version, click here

You've heard of brain surgeons and rocket scientists?  Well...think of me as a brain scientist1.

First, some clarifications...
So...what DO I do?

I am primarily interested in studying the cognitive processes involved in reading.  The ability to read is a skill that many of us acquire early on in life and take for granted in our everyday affairs.  We pick up the newspaper to check the score of the Red Sox game, we use the menu to order dinner at a new restaurant, we read over the textbook and our notes to study for the upcoming final exam, we check our e-mail to hear how our friends and family are doing.  In our western society, reading is not only a leisure activity (who hasn't snuggled up with a good book?), it is also a very important skill, necessary in our everyday activities at work, school, and play. 

Although most of us are quite good at reading (or can at least make due with a good dictionary at hand), the mental processes involved are quite complex.  We are presented with arbitrary letters, simple symbols consisting of combinations of lines and curves that mean nothing explicitly.  With practice, we learn that these letters have sounds associated with them, sounds that we hear in our everyday speech.  We can put these letters together to sound out entire words.  Even at that point, however, the reading process is far from complete.  Once we can identify the word, we must access that word's meaning from our long-term memory.  Identifying the letters "S-T-O-P" as the word "STOP" means nothing if we ignore the red sign and enter the intersection.  Very rarely, however, do we see words in isolation.  When we are reading a sentence, we must connect all of the words together (which requires working memory processes) to get the meaning for the whole sentence.  "He showed her baby the pictures" has a much different meaning than "He showed her the baby pictures", although the same words are used.  In addition, we must also be able to deal with ambiguities (e.g., "The chicken is ready to eat."  Who is hungry - you or the chicken?!), attach pronouns to antecedents ("John and Mary went to the store and HE bought HER a gift."), and interpret figurative language ("It's raining cats and dogs outside.").  And then there are paragraphs, and full novels which require even more connecting, more memory, more cognitive processing...

So, how do we do it?  That's the question I'm trying to answer. 

In order to answer questions about the reading process, I look at two different populations of people.  First, I study the reading behaviors of normal, skilled readers to get a picture of the way the mind usually processes written text.  So, if you can read, my research applies to you.  Secondly, I study the reading behaviors of individuals who have difficulty reading as the result of brain damage.  So, if you can't read, my research applies to you, too.
Why eye-tracking?

Investigating the things going on inside the mind when people are doing any task (including reading) can be complicated.  Even if the Human Subjects Ethics Committee allowed me to open up someone's head and look inside while they were reading, it would likely tell me very little about the mental processes involved.  However, the movement of the eyes while reading actually gives us a fascinating picture of what is going on inside our head.  When we read, our eyes make a series of stops and jumps, presenting information to our mind in a manner similar to that of a flip book.  We look at a section of the text (a word, for example), get information, then move our eyes to another location on the page...and the process repeats. 

We move our eyes because of acuity limitations.  We can see details most accurately when they are presented at the center of our vision (the area called the foveal region).  Since letters are very complex symbols, we need to move our eyes to bring these details into better focus.  Interestingly, while we are able to gain useful information about letters when they are located in the foveal region (for example, when they are in the word that we are currently looking at), we can also get information from the word to the right of where we are looking.  This area is called the parafovea.  One main area of my research involves studying what type of information we are able to get from the parafovea.  For example, do we get information about the identities of letters, the position of the letters, or information about whether the letters are vowels or consonants?

Part of my research involves exploring the importance of letter identity and letter position in reading.  Both letter identity and letter position must be encoded at some point during the reading process or else we would be unable to distinguish between anagrams like STOP, SPOT, TOPS, OPTS, POST, and POTS.  You may have received this e-mail forward that was circulated around in September 2003:
Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae.  The rset can be a ttoal mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm.  Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.

My research has revealed that much of this e-mail is incorrect.  First of all, no such research has been done at Cambridge University.  Second, although the first and the last letter of a word are perhaps the most important letters, the other letters are quite important, too.  True, you are able to piece together the sentences above to make sense of them.  However, reading text like this results in a 12% decrement in reading speed.  Thus, the task is no longer the same as normal skilled reading.  It is perhaps more akin to problem solving.  The moral of this story:  Don't believe everything you read on the Internet.

A second area of my research focuses on the reading patterns of individuals who have difficulty reading following brain damage (for example, from a stroke).  Studying populations of individuals with reading disorders is important on several levels.  First, research on language disorders in adults helps us gain a better understanding of the language deficits in these individuals.  According to the National Aphasia Association, about one-million people in the United States have an acquired language impairment.  The more that we know about these disorders, the better we can identify and treat them.  Secondly, research on special populations lets us to see what happens when something in the normal reading system goes wrong.  This can help us identify specific areas in the brain (or mental processes) that are necessary for skilled reading.

To learn even more about my research interests, click here to go to the jargony scientific version, which includes references for recently published papers and conference presentations.

1  Technically, I'm a "mind scientist" and not a "brain scientist," but HEY...you wanted the plain English version and sometimes that means blurring the lines of certain definitions.