When universal visuo-motor mechanisms meet endogenous and language-related processes: Determining principles of eye-movement control in reading.

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Ralf Engbert
• Subject Area: General, Cognitive and Mathematical Psychology
• Term: from 2008 to 2014
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 55047863

Reading is a complex cultural skill which plays a central role in an individual’s everyday life. It is permitted through the movements of our eyes along the lines of text, and depends on perceptual and cognitive processes as well as low-level visuo-motor processes associated with saccade programming. The aim of the present proposal is to investigate the interplay between visual, cognitive and oculomotor processes in order to develop a complete and realistic model of eye-movement control during expert reading that will serve, in a long term run, as a basis for the study of impaired reading and dyslexia.Several models of eye-movement control in reading have already been proposed, including SWIFT that was developed by the German partner; these consider that ongoing cognitive processes are the main driving force of the eyes. Proposed research will contrast the predictions of SWIFT with predictions of other cognitive models (e.g. E-Z Reader) as well as predictions from an alternative model which assumes that the spatial characteristics of eye movements are mainly under low-level visuo-motor control. This model is based on research conducted by the French partner, and it will be developed in a joint manner by French and German partners. Model testing will consist mainly of investigating the universality across languages and reading tasks of the effects of cognitive and visuo-motor variables on eye behaviour in reading. A corpus of eye-movement data will be collected in French, and crosslanguage comparisons will be conducted on the basis on data collected by the German partner as well as other partners in the larger European project.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: France
• Participating Person: Professorin Dr. Françoise Vitu-Thibault