Empirical and theoretical psychophysiological considerations regarding information processing during skilled reading

Current psychophysiological research regarding eye movements, cortical alpha rhythm, and memory mechanisms is reviewed in light of the role these phenomena may play in the process of skilled reading. A model of perceptual constriction leading to a decrease in reading performance is advanced. The psychological and physical manifestations of perceptual constriction are developed, and are discussed relative to the psychophysiological phenomena mentioned above. An attempt is made to provide a synthetic model of skilled reading and reading difficulties consistent with current theoretical and empirical knowledge. Such a model is useful to optometrists and other professionals interested in learning and reading difficulties

Are Eye Movements and EEG on the Same Page?: A Coregistration Study on Parafoveal Preview and Lexical Frequency

published Online: September 15, 2022Readers extract visual and linguistic information not only from fixated words but also upcoming parafoveal words to introduce new input efficiently into the language processing pipeline. The lexical frequency of upcoming words and similarity with subsequent foveal information both influence the amount of time people spend once they fixate the word foveally. However, it is unclear from eye movements alone the extent to which parafoveal word processing, and the integration of that word with foveally obtained information, continues after saccade plans have been initiated. To investigate the underlying neural processes involved in word recognition after saccade planning, we coregistered electroencephalogram (EEG) and eye movements during a gaze-contingent display change paradigm. We orthogonally manipulated the frequency of the parafoveal and foveal words and measured fixation related potentials (FRPs) upon foveal fixation. Eye movements showed primarily an effect of preview frequency, suggesting that saccade planning is based on the familiarity of the parafoveal input. FRPs, on the other hand, demonstrated a disruption in downstream processing when parafoveal and foveal input differed, but only when the parafoveal word was high frequency. These findings demonstrate that lexical processing continues after the eyes have moved away from a word and that eye movements and FRPs provide distinct but complementary accounts about oculomotor behavior and neural processing that cannot be obtained from either method in isolation. Furthermore, these findings put constraints on models of reading by suggesting that lexical processes that occur before an eye movement program is initiated are qualitatively different from those that occur afterward.This study was partially funded by the Spanish government (FPIMINECO Predoctoral Grant BES-2017-081797) and the society of Spanish scientists in United States (ECUSA; Fostering Grads mentorship program). Data from this study have been presented at the 2021 Psychonomic Society Annual Meeting and a departmental colloquium in the Department of Psychology at the University of South Florida. The data that support the findings of this study, the full sentence stimuli, and the code used for analyses, are available at https://osf.io/jkhvw/

Virtual Reality Games for Motor Rehabilitation

This paper presents a fuzzy logic based method to track user satisfaction without the need for devices to monitor users physiological conditions. User satisfaction is the key to any product’s acceptance; computer applications and video games provide a unique opportunity to provide a tailored environment for each user to better suit their needs. We have implemented a non-adaptive fuzzy logic model of emotion, based on the emotional component of the Fuzzy Logic Adaptive Model of Emotion (FLAME) proposed by El-Nasr, to estimate player emotion in UnrealTournament 2004. In this paper we describe the implementation of this system and present the results of one of several play tests. Our research contradicts the current literature that suggests physiological measurements are needed. We show that it is possible to use a software only method to estimate user emotion