In-house seminar
In this seminar we will get to know ReadLet, an ICT platform that uses a tablet in order to study the behavior of a reader by recording his/her tactile movements on the screen while he/she underlines the words of a text with his/her finger. The talk will be divided into two parts. In the first part of the talk, we will see how the finger tracking times closely correspond to the eye fixation times, suggesting a surprising consistency in the two recording modes. However, finger tracking is associated with a naturally continuous signal that extends over each line of the text, while eye movements are discrete and made up of alternating fixations and saccades. In the second part of the talk, we will then introduce a new approach to address these differences and further compare the eye and finger signals. In particular, we will see how a pattern similar to the ocular one, composed of fixations and saccades, emerges from the discretization of the finger velocity trace. The results obtained further strengthen the usability of the tactile movement tracking technology to study reading behavior in naturalistic contexts.
Speaker(s): Andrea Nadalini
He got a Master’s Degree in Linguistics at the University of Bologna. After a short internship at the International School of Advanced Studies in Trieste, he pursued his PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience under the supervision of Prof. Davide Crepaldi. Since February 2020 he has been a research fellow at the Comphys Lab of the Institute for Computational Linguistics “A. Zampolli” of the National Research Council of Italy. His research interests concern cognitive processes related to learning and strengthening of reading skills and, in particular, the way in which words are processed and represented within our lexical-semantic system. Previously, he worked on the interface between consciousness and semantic processing, trying to define what kind of information can be extracted from the words that are presented in a subliminal way. These issues were addressed by combining experimental techniques (eye tracking, semantic categorization and lexical decision tools, ERP) with computational tools (vector models).