CompCog: Reading as a rational process of visual information gathering

Reading is a near-ubiquitous behavior in modern industrialized societies, and is now one of the primary ways humans communicate. Reading is also a highly complex learned skill, requiring tight coordination between vision, language processing, and motor control, despite having emerged too recently to have exerted selective pressure on brain evolution. The external manifestations of reading are eye movements, made as readers direct the high-acuity portion of their retina to subsequent points of interest in a text. The timing and the precise spatial extent of these eye movements can be accurately captured by modern eye tracking technology, and research on reading has demonstrated that the details of these movements are a function of the underlying language processing. The goal of this project is to advance our understanding of reading behavior, and the language processing that underlies it, by rigorously testing a computational theory of reading as a rational process of linguistically-informed visual information gathering. To accomplish this goal, a set of open source computational models will be developed, implemented, and quantitatively evaluated against both existing datasets of human reading behavior and new experiments.