Psychonomics Poster 2015 – Eye Tracking and Metacomprehension

Aaron Wong will be presenting his poster at Psychonomics in Chicago in a few weeks. Here is the title and abstract:

Eye Tracking Metacomprehension

Studies have found that metacomprehension accuracy tends to be poor due to the use of inappropriate cues when making metacomprehension judgments. e situation model approach to metacomprehension suggests that judgments based on cues at the situation model level would result in high metacomprehension accuracy. However, the current methods of assessing metacomprehension accuracy make it difficult to determine if readers use cues generated during reading for making judgments. One potential method of determining whether online cues are used is to use an implicit measure, such as eye movements. In particular, regressions are theorized to occur when there are difficulties integrating new information with the existing situation model. e current study assessed whether eye movements could be used as an implicit measure of metacomprehension. Participants either read texts once or reread texts while their eye movements were recorded. Number of regressions was found to be a significant predictor of test performance, and other eye tracking measures were also examined in relation to test performance and metacomprehension judgments. endings suggest that eye movements can be used as an implicit measure of metacomprehension.

New publication on brain regions involved in discourse comprehension

Check out the newest publication from our lab.

Comprehension through explanation as the interaction of the brain’s coherence and cognitive control networks

Discourse comprehension processes attempt to produce an elaborate and well-connected representation in the reader’s mind. A common network of regions including the angular gyrus, posterior cingulate, and dorsal frontal cortex appears to be involved in constructing coherent representations in a variety of tasks including social cognition tasks, narrative comprehension, and expository text comprehension. Reading strategies that require the construction of explicit inferences are used in the present research to examine how this coherence network interacts with other brain regions. A psychophysiological interaction analysis was used to examine regions showing changed functional connectivity with this coherence network when participants were engaged in either a non-inferencing reading strategy, paraphrasing, or a strategy requiring coherence-building inferences, self-explanation. Results of the analysis show that the coherence network increases in functional connectivity with a cognitive control network that may be specialized for the manipulation of semantic representations and the construction of new relations among these representations.