Oculomotor Activity During Reading in Elementary School-Aged Students with Different Cognitive Skills

Abstract

Eye movements provide relevant information about the functional state of some cognitive functions. The connection between eye movements and cognitive processes is based on the anatomical and functional overlap of structures controlling them in different parts of the brain. Various human activities, including reading, are associated with eye movements. Reading skills include two components: reading technique (a motor component) and reading comprehension (a cognitive component). Monitoring and interpretation of oculomotor response is a useful tool for studying the reading process. The present study characterizes saccadic and fixation eye-movement components in 7-8 year-old elementary school students that showed poor reading comprehension. The students were divided into three groups based on answer quality: giving no answer, giving a wrong answer, and coping with the task only with a prompt. The groups were found to differ in the amplitude, velocity, and deceleration of pro- and regressive saccades and the average duration of fixations per word. Thus, eye-movement parameters can be used to characterize the groups of schoolchildren that experience difficulty in reading comprehension or in formulating an answer to a semantic question. The present study contributes insight into various cognitive reading strategies and can be useful for creating personal learning paths for elementary school students to master reading skills, which are important for social success

Keywords

• eye tracking
• saccades
• gaze fixation
• reading
• elementary school-aged students