Home Department: Psychology
Mentor: Jason Yeatman (Pediatrics, Education, and Psychology)

“Investigating the Relationship between Visual Attention and Eye Movements - a Natural Reading Behavior Study ”

Reading is a complex task demanding the shifting and focusing of attention. Reading development, visual attention development, and precision in eye movement patterns are all tightly intertwined. The Yeatman lab and Katelyn hypothesize that certain metrics of eye movements – like saccadic velocity (the time taken to move between words), reading speed, fixation duration (how long one lingers on a word) – correlate with voluntary control of attention. To test this, they will correlate measures of eye movement in natural reading with their performance in a visual encoding task, testing their ability to recognize letters and letter positions with voluntary and involuntary attentional cues. This work will improve our understanding of the relationship between visual acuity and the ability to focus.