News: Concordia researchers used eye-tracking technology to record eye movements of readers and found that people with dyslexia sample visual information slower and with more difficulty than normal readers.
Several metrics are used to measure eye movements including fixations (the duration of a stop), saccades (lengths of a jump) and counting the number of times a reader’s eyes express a jump. Johnson and his co-authors used instead standardized identical texts several sentences long that were read by 35 undergraduate students diagnosed with dyslexia and 38 others in a control group.
The researchers aimed to investigate if reading difficulties are a result of a cognitive or neurological origin or of the eye movements that guide the uptake of information while reading.
Researchers observed a real spectrum of reading speed, with some speeds among the dyslexic students as low as a third of the speed than that of the fastest readers in the control group.
“But by using a variety of measures to put together a comprehensive profile, we found that the difference in speed was not the result of longer processing times of non-linguistic visual information. This suggested there was a direct link to eye movements,” says lead author Léon Franzen.
The findings published in the Nature journal Scientific Reports suggest a mix of aberrant cognitive-linguistic and oculomotor processes being present in adults with dyslexia.
To Know More You May Refer To:
Franzen, L., Stark, Z. & Johnson, A.P. Individuals with dyslexia use a different visual sampling strategy to read text. Sci Rep 11, 6449 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-84945-9
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